PC/104-Plus frame grabber unveiled for embedded computer systems

FEBRUARY 4--Parvus Corporation (Salt Lake City, UT; www.parvus.com) has announced its FG104 video frame-grabber board--a low-cost, high-performance solution for capturing analog broadcast signals across the PCI bus in an embedded computer system. Based around the Conexant Fusion 878A video decoder, this compact PC/104-Plus form-factor board supports NTSC, PAL, and SECAM video formats for capture resolutions of up to 768 x 576 pixels and 30 frames/s. It can also subsample, scale, crop, and clip images at various resolutions and frame rates.

Supporting four CVBS composite inputs or three composite video and one S-Video (Y/C) input source, the FG104 module can simultaneously capture and digitize single frames from up to four devices (that is, video camera, TV, VCR). The board also accepts one audio input and includes 24 flexible digital I/O channels, which can be configured for digital video input and high-speed MPEG stream transport, or to input/output general board-level signals to/from the PC/104-Plus bus (for remote camera control).

Potential applications for the FG104 module include remote video surveillance, medical and industrial imaging, motion detection, and traffic monitoring. It can be used to place video data directly into host memory for video-capture applications or into a target video display frame buffer for video overlay applications. It can also be used as the multimedia hub of an Embedded PC system connecting multiple analog and digital video sources to the CPU module via a single PCI connection.

Parvus Corporation is a North American manufacturer and systems integrator of modular computer boards, enclosures, displays, and embedded systems based on the PC/104 computer standard. Parvus offers rugged, COTS computing solutions for avionics, military, medical, industrial, and transportation OEMs.