A hardware/software prototyping system for driving assistance investigations

A holistic design and verification environment to investigate driving assistance systems is presented, with an emphasis on system-on-chip architectures for video applications. Starting with an executable specification of a driving assistance application, subsequent transformations are performed across different levels of abstraction until the final implementation is achieved. The hardware/software partitioning is facilitated through the integration of OpenCV and SystemC in the same design environment, as well as OpenCV and Linux in the run-time system. We built a rapid prototyping, FPGA-based camera system, which allows designs to be explored and evaluated in realistic conditions. Using lane departure and the corresponding performance speedup, we show that our platform reduces the design time, while improving the verification efforts.