IP Camera
IP Camera was the main project I involved when I was working at Galaxycore Inc. This project is planned to produce the multimedia SoC for digital video cameras commonly employed for surveillance. we customized the original linux-2.6 kernel to add our own features. The project has been kicked off for one year before I joined the company, and I was on it for one year.
My roles in the project were as below:
• Bringing up modules
• Linux device driver programing
• Unit test and verification for modules
I mainly take the responsibility for the core module - image signal processing (ISP) pipeline consisting of Sensor, ISP and Video Codec. I brought up sub-modules like sensors (OV2710, AR0130), ISP, overlay on streams in the diagnosis code branch (used for bringing up and testing single module), and then ported them to Linux device drivers. I designed the ISP module driver based on the Video for Linux Two (V4L2) framework. In this way, all the sub-modules were abstracted into sub-devices and formed a device graph, so that I could use uniform APIs like IOCTL and other system calls in user space for the whole pipeline. Furthermore, I optimized the memory allocation of project’s finite DRAM, which could adjust dynamically according to the sensor’s resolution and different scenes.
Figure 1. Video Processing Pipeline for IP Camera
I mainly programed under the Linux operating system using C language and arm-none-linux-gnueabi-gcc as the cross-compiler toolchain. In the process, I taught myself Linux device driver and V4L2 API specification, H.264 Codec knowledge etc. This project enhanced my understanding of ARM architecture, cache coherency and kernel memory management.