OCTOBER 7, 2009--The first SuperSpeed USB-enabled video camera was unveiled at the 2009 Intel Developer Forum (IDF) in San Francisco, September 22-24. The demonstration streamed uncompressed 1080p60 video from a Point Grey Research (Richmond, BC, Canada; www.ptgrey.com) camera to a USB 3.0 host controller from Fresco Logic (Beaverton, OR, USA; www.frescologic.com).
The prototype camera from Point Grey Research uses the new 3-Mpixel Sony IMX036 CMOS image sensor. The sensor supports the HD 1080p60 mode, which allows the camera to output raw, uncompressed 1920 x 1080 pixel images at 60 frames/s.
The camera is connected to a USB 3.0 interface card on the host side, which is powered by the FL1000, a PCI Express-to-SuperSpeed USB Extensible Host Controller Interface (xHCI) chip from Fresco Logic. The host PC uses an Intel i5-based P7P55D motherboard from ASUS (Taipei, Taiwan; www.asus.com).
"We are very excited to visually demonstrate the bandwidth offered by USB 3.0," says Vlad Tucakov, director of sales and marketing at Point Grey. "One of the potential benefits of the increased bandwidth of USB 3.0 is that it allows the main processor to handle compression. This means that different types of compression can be used for different applications and that some applications, like face recognition, can work on uncompressed video data for increased performance. We certainly see USB 3.0 as a key interface technology for machine and computer vision, and one we plan to integrate into future Point Grey imaging products."
"This is another key milestone for SuperSpeed USB," says Jeff Ravencraft, chairman of the USB Implementers Forum. "This demonstration gives users insight into some of the other applications that are possible with SuperSpeed USB in addition to the high-speed data transfers with external storage devices that we have seen so far."
-- Posted by Conard Holton, Vision Systems Design, www.vision-systems.com
