Stereo on a Chip

The ‘Videre’ vision and robotics market with high-quality vision hardware, software, and mobile robots. Design specializes in stereo vision hardware and software for embedded applications. Stereo vision provides real-time, full-field distance information, and is potentially useful in a wide variety of fields, including robotics, personal entertainment, and space automation. Videre Design maintains a close relationship with SRI's Artificial Intelligence Center, and distributes their Small Vision System for real-time stereo analysis.

Using Videre Design LLC products, researchers, educators, students, and product developers create custom vision and navigation systems with excellent performance, easy and rapid development, significant cost savings and flexibility to address diverse applications.
Videre Design LLC has developed an extensive international client base including BMW, Deere & Company, Google, IBM, MIT, NOAA Fisheries, Siemens, the US Defense Department and most universities that study vision and robotics in over 40 countries. Videre Design LLC's products have been used in numerous applications including people tracking, Google book project, DARPA Grand Challenge, autonomous vehicles, kiosks, and underwater fish tracking.

Stereo on a Chip, or STOC, performs all of the functions of the Stereo Engine on camera, and does it faster than the PC implementation, at a fraction of the power.  Offload the stereo computation from your PC, freeing up resources for your application.
The STOC board is extremely compact.  It fits into our current fixed-baseline stereo device, the STH-DCSG, creating a standalone device that performs realtime stereo at VGA (640x480) resolution.   A standard Firewire interface delivers video and disparity (range) information over a single cable.

STOC Features

• Stereo computation on the chip reduces PC computation
• Calibrated at the factory, so there is no need to perform a calibration step - it is a "plug and play" device. It can also be upgraded in the field, with different lenses, using the standard SVS calibration procedure.
• Maximum resolution: 640H x 480V pixels
• Color and monochrome versions
• Global shutter - all pixels exposed at the same time
• Simultaneous exposure and readout
• Direct digital information from the imagers, bypasses analog noise and frame grabber jitter
• Conforms to Digital Camera Specification version 1.30.
• Single-cable interface for power, data, and control
• Synced imagers expose corresponding pixels at exactly the same time
• External synchronization - all DCSG devices on the same IEEE 1394 bus are synchronized to capture images at the same time
• Subsampling modes (binning and subwindow) for smaller frame sizes, faster frame rates, lower noise
• Electronic gain and exposure
• All modes fully under user control via the IEEE 1394 bus
• Milled solid aluminum alloy body for extreme rigidity
• Accepts standard C/CS-mount lenses

STOC Kit Contents

• STH-DCSG stereo head, color or monochrome
• 3.0 mm miniature 12 mm diameter lenses standard; other lenses available as options
• Small Vision System stereo analysis software for MS Windows 2000/XP or Linux 2.4/2.6
• 2 meter IEEE 1394 6-pin to 6-pin cable
• Hardware and Software Manuals