Graphics Solutions

When Junior sits in front of the computer playing video games, he probably has little idea that the technology he's enjoying is also at play in many important applications. The PC platforms and processor chips that help him track the good guys and the bad guys in his game, can help track and protect regular folks as they go about their daily business.

National Instruments in Austin, Texas, is one company that fills an important niche.

"The way NI fits in, we provide the tools to do solutions and go through partners and integrators," says Matt Slaughter, Vision Product Manager. "We resell some cameras, but manufacture our own frame grabbers. For things like optics or lighting, we go through partners with NI hardware and software.

"We have really good synchronization between platforms with any kind of camera interface or data acquisition cards," he adds. "We also can synchronize two cards. For example, we can take two cards that relate; one does the picture, another does measurement. It can take a picture of a tank and measure the pressure inside, or take an infrared picture and measure the pressure or temperature. A lot of companies are doing vision, but not entire measurements of data acquisition, motion and vision."

NI works with a number of research facilities. Joanneum Research in Graz, Austria, for example, uses NI's LabVIEW programming language, software and frame grabber to develop airport security applications for tracking individuals or vehicles. Joanneum's Institute for Digital Image Processing deals with problems related to surveillance applications, including tracking pedestrians in video streams, says Joanneum's Oliver Sidla on NI's web site.

"It's set up for airport security," says NI's Slaughter. "You can track individuals or vehicles. You just train it on what you want to track using advanced vision algorithms."

Adds Joanneum's Sidla: "Any form of change detection, even with very sophisticated models, is limited in complex real-world situations. When it comes to tracking of objects, it is essential to have a sense of where things are going. The algorithms for the computation of optical flow are countless and we, on our own, have developed several solutions in the last 15 years. To optimize the efficiency and accuracy of such an algorithm for LabView implementation we chose the Kanade Lucas Tomasi (KLT) point-tracking algorithm. This method uses local gradient and image differences in order to calculate the motion of small patches from image to image in an iterative process."

Deep In The Heart Of TI
Texas Instruments is playing a role in the surveillance market based on its DaVinci™ technology. DaVinci is a collection of digital signal processing (DSP) system-solution components tailored for digital cameras, video security, advanced medical imaging and portable video players.

"DaVinci integrated into security applications," explains Yvonne Lee, Video Surveillance Solutions Marketing Manager.

"The way it evolved, it was a general technology platform to handle video, then digital media. The first [evolution of DaVinci] was a huge success in the video surveillance market in DVRs. It had multiple channels and six video ports.

Over time, customers used the device in digital IP, but it had too many peripherals. Based on customer input, we implemented heterogeneous architecture. It was more sophisticated video. We also looked at how the overall IP camera worked. Customers want to encode; they want flexible architecture with mpeg4, jpeg, and the video compression standard H.264, which allows them to increase the video stream."

TI has a group working on surveillance solutions, but also works with more than 600 third parties. "We leverage them to provide variety and options and algorithms, so they can pick and choose what they want," Lee says. "Sometimes the code and hardware are done for them. All those algorithms had been on the PC. You had to capture the image from the camera, digitize it to the PC and add the algorithms."

On The Screen
NVIDIA (Santa Clara, Calif.) Quadro® products are designed for professional workstation applications in computer-aided design (CAD), computer-aided engineering (CAE), digital content creation and visualization.

Features of the latest line, the Quadro FX 4600, FX 56-00 and Quadro Plex VCS Model IV, include:

* Shader Model 4.0, which enables a higher level of performance and ultra-realistic effects for OpenGL and DirectX 10 professional applications.
* Frame buffers up to 1.5 GB deliver throughput needed for interactive visualization and real-time processing of large textures and frames, enabling the superior quality and resolution for full-scene antialiasing (FSAA).
* New Unified Architecture—Industry-first unified architecture capable of dynamically allocating compute, geometry, shading and pixel processing power for optimized GPU performance.
* GPU Computing for Visualization.

"Today's cutting-edge gaming and film experiences are built around tremendous 3D imagery. Designing this content requires high-quality real-time feedback regardless of complexity," said Bill Roberts, director of product management at Softimage Co. "NVIDIA's support of shader model 4.0 combined with the real-time shader architecture of SOFTIMAGE|XSI allows game developers to quickly create advanced visual effects for the Microsoft Vista OS by providing the most accurate visual feedback."