Fixed Homography-Based Real-Time SW/HW Image Stitching Engine for Motor Vehicles

In this paper, we propose an efficient architecture for a real-time image stitching engine for vision SoCs found in motor vehicles. To enlarge the obstacle-detection distance and area for safety, we adopt panoramic images from multiple telegraphic cameras. We propose a stitching method based on a fixed homography that is educed from the initial frame of a video sequence and is used to warp all input images without regeneration. Because the fixed homography is generated only once at the initial state, we can calculate it using SW to reduce HW costs. The proposed warping HW engine is based on a linear transform of the pixel positions of warped images and can reduce the computational complexity by 90% or more as compared to a conventional method. A dual-core SW/HW image stitching engine is applied to stitching input frames in parallel to improve the performance by 70% or more as compared to a single-core engine operation. In addition, a dual-core structure is used to detect a failure in state machines using rock-step logic to satisfy the ISO26262 standard. The dual-core SW/HW image stitching engine is fabricated in SoC with 254,968 gate counts using Global Foundry's 65 nm CMOS process. The single-core engine can make panoramic images from three YCbCr 4:2:0 formatted VGA images at 44 frames per second and frequency of 200 MHz without an LCD display.