TI and Aptina announce HD IP camera reference design

Texas Instruments (TI) and Aptina Imaging have announced a high-definition (HD) IP camera reference design, the DM355IPNC-MT5. Based on TI’s TMS320DM355 DaVinci processor and Aptina’s 5-megapixel sensor, the camera can serve up simultaneous 720p and CIF MPEG-4 streams with G.711 audio.

The DM355IPNC-MT5 comes in a low-end version and a mid-range version. Both are based on the DM355, which features an ARM 9 running at 216 or 270 MHz and coprocessors for MPEG-4 and MJPEG encoding. The low-end camera with only the processor and sensor boards has a BOM cost of USD 35. Additional features such as power over Ethernet, audio, and UART boost the cost to just under USD 50. TI also offers a ‘mid-range’ device that augments the low-end version with an analytics daughter card powered by a DM643x DaVinci.

In addition to the OS, network stacks and audio/video codecs provided with previous DaVinci devices, the DM355IPNC-MT5 includes an example camera application with source code. The source code includes all basic functionality required to implement a camera, including integrated auto white balance/auto exposure, simple motion detection, dual stream HD MPEG4 and MJPEG codecs, and the DaVinci IP network camera software frameworks.

For the image sensor, TI worked closely with third party Aptina Imaging to tune the image sensor to TI’s processing board. The 5-megapixel Aptina sensor uses 2x2 pixel binning to produce a 1.3-megapixel image before sending it to the processing board. This also improves the sensor's low-light performance.