How to Develop a 4K Ultra High Definition Image/Video Processing Application Using Zynq® MPSoC FPGA

Achieving higher resolution is a never-ending race for camera, TV and display manufacturers. After the emergence of 4K ultra high definition (Ultra HD) imaging in the market, it became the main standard for today’s multimedia products. 4k Ultra HD brings us bigger screens which give an immersive feeling. With this standard, the pixilation problem was solved in the big screens. 4K consumers are everywhere, from live sport broadcasting to video conferencing on our mobile devices. There are, however, many technical challenges in developing systems to process 4k Ultra HD resolution data. As an example, a 4K frame size is 3840 x 2160 pixels (8.5 Mpixel) and is refreshed at a 60Hz, equating to about 500 Mpixel/sec. This requires a high-performance system to process 4k frames in real time. Another bottleneck is power consumption particularly for embedded devices where power is critical. Being low power yet high performance, FPGAs, have shown a strong potential to tackle these challenges. In this blog, you’ll learn all you need to know to start developing a 4K video conferencing project using FPGAs.

Are FPGAs the Right Choice For 4K Ultra HD Image/Video Processing?

Because of the high volume of data and the computationally intensive algorithms in 4K Ultra HD image/video applications, there are four main candidates for the processing technology: GPU, CPU, ASIC or FPGA. Of these, the last is proving increasingly popular.

FPGAs deliver high performance, low latency, low power and are reconfigurable. These are the most important requirements for an embedded system responsible for image/video processing.

Let’s now discuss why FPGAs are the best choice for 4K Ultra HD image or video processing briefly; but if you want a more detailed explanation, I strongly recommend you give an earlier blog I wrote “FPGA vs GPU for Machine Learning Applications: Which one is better?” a read. FPGAs can easily support massive parallelism, thanks to the high number of I/O pins and the flexibility of designing any module in pure hardware. This is an advantage over a CPU. On the other hand, the low power and low latency, which comes through not being tied to a pre-built architecture, wins over GPUs. Lastly, FPGA reconfigurability means faster time to market and reduces overall costs compared to an ASIC. FPGA I/Os are highly configurable. You can configure anytime the direction, voltage, slew rate, speed and terminations. This reconfigurability also lets us optimize the image processing algorithm anytime we need to.

Now that we know why FPGAs are superior, let’s check out an example design for a 4k Ultra HD video conferencing using FPGAs.

Aldec’s solution for 4K video conferencing using Zynq FPGA

Aldec’s TySOM product line includes Xilinx Zynq-7000 and US+ MPSoC FPGA-based embedded development boards and FMC daughter cards.

For this project, we have used a TySOM-3-ZU7EV device which includes a XCZU7EV device on it. The board has a wide range of peripherals – that include HDMI 2.0 IN/OUT, QSFP+, DisplayPort, Ethernet, USB 3.0 – which make this board ideal for a 4K Ultra HD video conferencing project. In addition, the ZU7EV device includes a H.264/H.265 Video Codec Unit (VCU) which can perform video compression and decompression of real time 4K @ 60Hz video.

The main advantage of using Zynq device is the flexibility of using a hardened multi core ARM processor alongside programable logics. For computationally intensive application such as video processing, the heavy algorithms can be offloaded to the FPGA for acceleration.

For the rest of this article, visit the Aldec Design and Verification Blog

Tags: 4K video Processing, embedded, FPGA Image Processing, FPGA Video Processing, Zynq MPSoC FPGA

Categories: Emulation/Acceleration, TySOM Boards, TySOM EDK

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2020 at 12:44 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.