My chums at Impulse Accelerated Technologies are rather pleased with themselves because the guys and gals at Hella Aglaia have completed a design for a computer vision 3D automatic passenger counting system using Impulse tools and Xilinx FPGAs in an ASIC prototyping flow.

Actually this is a rather interesting story with two aspects to it... First of all we want to know "How did they do it?" And the follow-up question would be "Why did they do it?" The reason for my follow-up question is that Hella Aglaia Mobile Vision GmbH, which specializes in the development of intelligent visual sensor systems, is a subsidiary of automotive supplier Hella KGaA. So, my knee-jerk reaction to this announcement was: "Do I really need a computer with sophisticated 3D visual recognition capabilities to tell me how many other folks are in my car with me?" We'll return to ponder this poser in a moment, but let us start by considering what they've done and how they did it...

As we all know (if you don;t, it's not for want of my telling you [grin]), Impulse Accelerated Technologies provides C-to-FPGA tools and custom hardware/software solutions for financial, defense, and industrial customers worldwide. Impulse tools are used for vision systems, facial recognition, geospatial analysis and video feed analysis for national security and automotive applications. The point is that when they determined to design their 3D people-counting ASIC, the folks Hella Aglaia decided to use Inpulse's C-to-FPGA tools to prototype the design using high-level synthesis and Xilinx FPGAs.

Based on 3D- Sense Technology, the result is Hella Aglaia's Automatic Passenger Counting System – the AVC1 – which can be used in any environment which offers a flexible installation height and a minimum distance to passengers of 10cm. An adjustable counting threshold allows measurement of heights for the distinction to be made between children and adults.

"About half of the Impulse C to FPGA users are developing video and image processing applications with our tool set" says David Buechner, VP at Impulse, he continues, "National security operations, automotive suppliers, and vision systems developers are using Impulse C design methods to help process very large, sometimes overwhelming amounts of incoming video data from multiple sources.  Impulse users program FPGAs to process different parts of video feeds in parallel: filtering, preparing and parsing information at near real time or line speeds.  With Impulse software, programmers report developing FPGAs 50% faster than standard VHDL or Verilog methods and improving existing FPGA projects 80% faster than standard HDL methods."

"Impulse tools provide an easy to learn ANSI C programming environment for computer vision system development" says Spyridon Nikolaidis, Engineering Manager at Hella .  "The support team was very responsive and helped us meet our prototyping and system development schedule. In addition to the Impulse compiler, we used the Impulse HDL test bench generator and were very quickly able to compare our Impulse C results with a ModelSim report. We estimate we saved significant development effort using Impulse tools."

Now lets' return to our question: "Why did they do it?" Once again, do we really need a computer to tell us how many other folks are in the car with us? Well, I don’t know for sure, but my suspicion is that the guys and gals at Hella Aglaia are trying to expand their horizons beyond automobiles into other application areas and industry segments. Let's ask ourselves where this sort of ability might be useful...

Well, how about airplanes? A few days ago as I pen these words I flew back to the USA from England. As you can imagine, security is considered to be rather important these days. I can imagine that it could be rather useful to have a system that counted all of the folks getting onto a plane and informing the crew that they had more (or less) folks than had been officially booked in...

And what about coaches? A couple of years ago I accompanied my son on his fifth-grade school trip to Washington DC. I think we had three coaches in all. We were constantly stopping for food and restroom breaks. Once we re-boarded, the first thing we had to do was re-count everyone to make sure we were all present and correct. It might be some time before we would trust a computer to do this, but it would be nice to have a confirmation that everyone was on board.

Also, thinking about it, I can see military applications for this sort of thing. For example it might be useful foe military transport vehicles and helicopters and suchlike to provide an automatic count of everyone on board so as to ensure that no one is left behind in the fog of war.

Now my head is buzzing with ideas. What about buildings? If you had computer systems automatically counting everyone going into and out of a building, and into and out of elevators on each floor and so forth, then in the event of an emergency the rescue services could be informed that there are X number of folks still on floor 'n', Y number of folks remaining on floor 'm', and so on.

Hmmm, interesting...