Although considered ‘ancient’ because invented in the early nineties, the JPEG standard is far from being dead or superseded. Its basic methods are still up to date for modern video compression.
For low latency image streaming, we have developed our own system on chip encoder solution ‘dorothea’ in 2013. It is based on the second generation L2 (a tag referring to ‘two lane’) JPEG engine, allowing JPEG compression of YCbCr 4:2:2 video at full pixelclock.
The ‘dorothea’ SoC is now superseded by the new ZPUng architecture, allowing more microcode tricks than on the previous MIPS based SoC. It is available as reference design ‘dombert’ (see SoC design overview) for UDP streaming up to 100 Mbps, optionally, 1G cores (third party) can be deployed as well for more throughput.
L2 example videos
These example videos are taken by direct capture (as coming from the camera) of the UDP video stream. The direct Bayer to YUV422 method is implemented in a microcode engine (license and patent free) and may still show visible artefacts, also, color correction is not implemented for this demo. For the live videos, a MT9M024 sensor on the HDR60 development kit has been used. Bit files for evaluation are available in the Reference Design section.
- Stress pattern multi resolution video
- 1024×768@30 fps Quality 80% critical color ‘still’
- 1024×768@30 fps Quality 80% HDR and fabric texture test
- HDR artefact test