What image sensors can Faststream interface?
CMOS and CCD sensors, and infrared detectors across the SWIR, VNIR and LWIR bands — with or without their proximity electronics — as well as commercial camera modules and custom focal-plane arrays.
IMAGE SENSORS
Image sensors and the interfaces that read them.
A sensor does not produce an image; it produces a stream that has to be read out, corrected and reconstructed. The sensor is rarely the hard part — the work is interfacing it, correcting its non-idealities, and doing so at the pixel rate, on FPGA fabric, across visible and infrared bands.
THE SENSORS
What we read.
Faststream interfaces and characterises image sensors across technologies and spectral bands — from commercial camera modules to custom focal-plane arrays that arrive with no digital interface at all, only analog read-out and a detector that has to be biased and captured before a single pixel exists in the digital domain.
- CMOS and CCD sensors — visible-band imagers, commercial modules and custom devices.
- Infrared detectors — SWIR, VNIR and LWIR, with or without their proximity electronics.
- Focal-plane arrays — including cooled and uncooled detectors and InGaAs 2-D arrays behind a read-out IC.
- Thermal imagers — where non-uniformity and bad-pixel correction decide whether the image is usable at all.
THE INTERFACES
Every sensor speaks a different one.
Analog or digital, standard or avionics-grade — the interface is chosen for the sensor and the platform, not the other way around.
- Analog / proximity electronics — low-noise biasing and ADC capture for detectors with no digital output.
- CamLink & LVDS — the workhorse parallel and serial links for industrial and scientific cameras.
- MIPI-CSI-2 — the mobile and embedded camera-serial interface.
- PAL / NTSC / VGA — legacy analog video, still present in fielded systems.
- HDMI, DisplayPort 1.4 & HD-SDI — high-resolution display and broadcast links.
- ARINC 818, GigE Vision & USB 3.1 Gen 1 — avionics video, machine-vision and host streaming.
THE ISP
Correcting what the sensor gets wrong.
A raw sensor stream is defective, non-uniform and mosaiced. The image-signal-processing chain — implemented as streaming FPGA IP — turns it into a usable image. The core blocks exist as proven IP; the sensor-adaptive blocks are developed to order for a given device and application.
- Bad-pixel correction — detecting and replacing defective pixels on the fly.
- Non-uniformity correction — essential for infrared and thermal detectors.
- Bayer processing — demosaicing to full-colour images.
- Colour-correction matrix — a pre-calibrated per-sensor 3×3 correction.
- Gamma correction — normalisation and tone rescaling.
- Developed to order — auto-exposure, auto-white-balance and auto-focus on top of the standard chain.
IMAGE PROCESSING
Enhancement and analysis IP.
Beyond the ISP, a library of enhancement and analysis blocks — each a fixed-point RTL core that streams at the pixel rate.
- Noise reduction — Gaussian, bilateral and median filtering.
- Edge detection — Canny enhancement and phase-correlation.
- Dynamic-range adjustment — CLAHE and multi-scale Retinex (MSRCR).
- Morphology — dilation, erosion, opening and closing, and thresholding.
- Object tracking — centroid- and correlation-based visual tracking.
- Geometric & frequency — flip and rotation, 2D-FFT, anti-aliasing.
- Panorama — multi-sensor stitching and blending.
- Motion stabilisation — real-time video stabilisation.
- Archival — JPEG and JPEG 2000 compression for storage and downlink.
THE WHOLE CHAIN
Sensor to processed, streamed output.
The same design pattern each time: read the sensor over whatever interface it offers, correct its defects and reconstruct colour in a streaming FPGA ISP, enhance and analyse, then compress and stream or display — often as a heterogeneous FPGA-plus-processor system where the fabric does the pixel-rate work and the processor handles stitching, overlay and transport.
CAPABILITY & WORK
Where this shows up.
The platform, the disciplines and the programmes this rests on.
PLATFORM
Faststream Vision
Machine vision and edge inference.
CAPABILITYComputer Vision Engineering
The imaging chain, end to end.
SERVICEFPGA Design
Architecture, HDL, timing closure.
CASE STUDYComplete image pipeline
Sensor to compressed image.
CASE STUDYHigh-speed sensor validation
Interfacing a ~2,000 fps DROIC.
SOLUTIONImage Processing & FPGA Vision
The wider body of imaging work.
WHERE THIS APPLIES
Industries this serves.
COMMON QUESTIONS
Questions this gets asked.
Which sensor and video interfaces are supported?
Analog proximity electronics, CamLink and LVDS, MIPI-CSI-2, PAL/NTSC/VGA, HDMI, DisplayPort 1.4 and HD-SDI, plus ARINC 818, GigE Vision and USB 3.1 Gen 1.
What is an image-signal-processing (ISP) pipeline?
The chain that corrects a sensor's non-idealities and reconstructs a usable image: bad-pixel correction, non-uniformity correction, Bayer demosaicing, a colour-correction matrix and gamma — implemented as streaming FPGA IP.
What is proximity electronics?
The analog front end placed close to an infrared detector or read-out IC — low-noise biasing, ADC capture and on-FPGA correction — often required before any standard digital interface exists on the sensor.
Can auto-exposure, auto-white-balance and auto-focus be added?
Yes. These sit on top of the standard ISP blocks and are developed to order for a given sensor and application.
Do you handle thermal and infrared imaging?
Yes — including non-uniformity and bad-pixel correction, ultra-low-noise detector biasing, and real-time contrast enhancement for thermal imagers.
KEEP READING
Related work.
BUILD WITH FASTSTREAM
Bring us the sensor.
Tell us the detector, the interface and the band. Reading, correcting and processing image sensors on FPGA fabric — visible or infrared — is core Faststream work.