Test Image Generator ARMmovie.c : for a Vis-NIR spectral camera development

Abstract

This report describes a C language program that can be used in both offline or online generation of test images for a special spectral camera prototype software that is run on a Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA). The FPGA has two ARM processor cores on the same chip where the program can be run under an operating system, such as Linux, or actually its reduced version called Petalinux, or immediately in a ’baremetal’ mode without any operating system as a stand-alone ARM assembler program. It was this flexibility of running modes and the limited memory resources of the FPGA board, which were the main reasons why C language realisation was chosen. The program is designed to be used for both supporting software development and for online self-test type operations in the camera support software run on an FPGA that contains also two traditional ARM processors. The program generates purely synthetic images, or patterns, or can blend real images read from files with synthetic patterns. There are a set of parameters controlling the generation details and they can be input from a file, or they can be introduced via an internal data structure that can be manually tailored before the compilation. The program can generate single images or a sequence of images that can be e.g. externally be combined into a gif animation file.