Digital Video/Still “Dual Cam”

The Challenge

 Aiptek, a Taiwan based manufacturer of consumer electronic devices, saw a market opportunity for a new class of product that would combine a Digital Still Camera and a Digital Camcorder into one and achieve virtually unlimited recording.  Limited only by the size of the storage media of MPEG-4 video, an emerging compression standard.

Aiptek’s challenge was to find a Digital Signal Processor that met the demanding performance and power requirements of this new category of product while offering the flexibility that would be needed to ‘tweak’ the product almost up until production.

The Solution

Selecting the ChipWrights programmable vector DSP architecture allowed Aiptek to combine a Digital Still Camera and a Digital Camcorder into one and achieve their performance and power targets.  Built-in NAND Flash, CompactFlash™ and MicroDrives™  in a small palm sized form factor created a camera that could used for all occasions.

The ChipWrights DSP is the only processor in the camera system, handling everything from capturing the raw image from the 3 Megapixel CMOS sensor, the image processing (Bayer interpolation, Auto-exposure, Auto White Balance, Gamma Correction, Color space conversion), Compression (JPEG, MJPEG, MPEG4), Display (LCD or NTSC/PAL), File system and Storage. This was accomplished all in software using the Serial (RISC) and Parallel (Vector DSP) execution units of the CW4512 Digital Media DSP.  A user interface that supports 10 different languages make this camera a product that can be sold worldwide.

Features like a Voice recorder (record and playback) add to versatility. The comprehensive playback feature can display full frame or thumbnail images of the Still images (JPEG), Voice files (wav), and Video files (ASF, AVI) for easy selection. Display the Still images and the Video files on the attached LCD panel or on a standard television set that supports either the NTSC or PAL standards. Fast forward and pause video clips for easy viewing. 

The ChipWrights architecture pushed the performance of capturing MPEG4 video to a new high achieving 30 fps at QVGA and VGA at greater than 24 fps.  The camera captured over 3 hours of video onto a 512 Mb CompactFlash card, on a single set of 4 AA batteries.