IMPLEMENTATION OF A DSP-BASED VIDEO COMMUNICATIONS SYSTEM

Abstract

The thesis presents the implementation of a digital signal processor (DSP) based video communications system which is developed to serve as a testbed for different real-time video communications algorithms. The central processor is the high performance TMS320C80 Multimedia Video Processor (MVP) from Texas Instruments, which is a single chip multiprocessor-based fully programmable DSP that is optimised for image and video operations. We call our system the Multimedia Video Processor based Video Communication System or MVPVCS. The modular design approach is adopted for the MVPVCS, which is composed of the main module, the video capture module, the video display module and the host interlace. The main module is the core of the MVPVCS, where all the video processing takes place. The system memory is made up of two industry standard DRAM single in-line memory modules (SIMMs) and is expandable from 8MB to 64MB. The video capture module is able to transform both NTSC and PAL composite video signals into digital colour format such as YUV. The video display module converts the digital YUV video data to various video signals such as NTSC, PAL and SECAM. The 2Mbit VRAM bank is able to support high resolution display. Both the video capture and display modules are programmable via the I2C bus. The ITU-T H.263 video coding standard for low bit-rate applications has been implemented on the MVPVCS. The timing performance is measured through the JTAG emulator and shows that MVPVCS is capable of performing video encoding at a rate close to real-time.