Energy and Power Engineering, 2013, 5, 575-578
doi:10.4236/epe.2013.54B110 Published Online July 2013 (http://www.scirp.org/journal/epe)
Study on Data Acquisition and Storage Based on FPGA in
Carrier-based Photoelectric Warning System*
Feng Qu, Dongjun Yang, Jian Zhao, Qian Sun
Changchun Institute of Optics, Fine Mechanics and Physics Chinese Academy of Sciences Changchun, China
Received March, 2013
ABSTRACT
In order to capture and storage video data real-time for carrier-based photoelectric warning system, an acquisition and
storage system based on FPGA is designed. To complete the asynchronous interface timing of the camera and the stor-
age system, the video data which come from infrared camera and visible light camera is stored to FIFO by FPGA, and
then four SDRAM as cache and ping-pong operation cache-data storage to the CF card, this structure not only takes
advantage of high-speed readin g and writing skills of CF card, but also to ensure the integ rity of the video data. In the
final experiment proved that the system can be effectively applied to ships the photoelectric warning scanning system,
its performance fully meet the needs of practical application.
Keywords: FPGA; Ping-Pong Operation; CF Card; Carrier-based Photoelectric Warning System
1. Introduction
When the ship is at sea, a variety of objects around with-
in a certain distance including other vessels, offshore
reefs can cause some potentially dangerous. Especially in
some of dangerous waters, there are a lot of pirates,
which is a larger threat to commercial vessels. Therefor e,
in order to be able to detect dang erous and warning need
to install photoelectric tracking and monitoring system,
to facilitate carry out maritime search, monitoring, law
enforcement evidence, fault diagnosis, and could serve as
military target positioning, tracking [1-3]. Because it is
very important of data storage, especially incidents of
data storage, an acquisition and storage system based on
FPGA and CF card is designed, which takes advantage of
the high-speed flexible configuration characteristics of
the FPGA, as well as the unique advantages of the CF
card.
CF card (compact flash card) is a large capacity, small
size, high speed memory card which is easy to carry, it is
first proposed by SanDisk Corporation in 1994, and
compatible with PCMCIA-ATA, it is a kind of solid
products, whose safety and reliability is much higher
than traditional hard drives and other portable storage
devices. Its storage speed is the biggest advantage; usu-
ally can reach 40MByte/s when read or write[4-6].
2. Structure of System
2.1. The Structure of the Overall System
Carrier-based photoelectric warning system is mainly
used for targets detection, tracking, monitoring and re-
cording in the distance of the river and sea. The system
uses an embedded system design, includes high-per-
formance optical lens, CCD cameras, infrared cameras
and infrared lenses. Computer automatic control tech-
nology, image processing and pattern recognition tech-
niques (real-time video enhancement, abnormal target
detection and identification automatic target acquisition
and tracking), real-time electronic image stabilization
technology and real-time early warning technology are
also applied in the system. The system overall structure
is shown in Figure 1 .
In order to achieve real-time processing of video im-
ages, the system uses a linear pipelining array structure
based on t he DSP + FPGA.
The system requires two DSP for tracking process of
long-wave infrared and visible light images respectively,
and the FPGA is responsible for transferring the video to
the DSP cache for processing, and while transfers the
processe d d ata to a CF car d for data sto ra ge.
2.2. The Structure of Data Acquisition and
Storage
*Supported by the program of academy-locality cooperation of the Chi-
nese Academy of Sciences (2011CJT0004), the Jilin province science
and technology development plan item (20090557 and 20125092). In the system, FPGA not only to control the timing of
capturing video, also needs to transfers the collected

F. QU ET AL.
576
video data to the DSP for processing, and save the emer-
gency(such as suspicious-target or collision, accident,
etc.) original video to the CF card by the DSP commands.
Since the transmission of the video clock is 27 MHz, and
SDRAM read and write clock is 100 MHz, and DSP to
read and write clock is 150MHz, and CF card reader
clock is 54 MHz, how to manage the FPGA asynchro-
nous timing is the key to ensure system normal operation,
Therefore, we have adopted the asynchronous FIFO
structure [7], and the system structure shown in Figur e 2.
3. Interface between CF Card and FPGA
There are three basic modes supported by CF card: PC
Card Memory mode, PC Card I / O mode and True IDE
mode. This system uses the PC Card Memory mode, and
takes advantages of the feature of hot-swappable. The
main communication interface between FPGA and CF
Card as follows:
1) REG for ordinary operating CF card memory or the
configuration memory, active low;
2) OE, WE ar e reader str obe pin of the CF car d, active
low;
3) CE1, CE2 pins are used to select the CF card work
in 8-bit mode or 16-bit mode, active low;
4) CFADR0 ~ CFADR10 are CF card address bus;
5) CFDAT0 ~ CFDAT15 are CF card data bus;
The hardware interface between FPGA and CF card is
shown in Figure 3.
4. Design of System Software
4.1. System Workflow
The system works as follows:
1) First, two camera's video data is collected through
the decoder chip and stored in the SDRAM by FPGA.
There should be four SDRAM chips for ping-pong op-
eration, of which two are used to do video capture and
storage, the other two as output cache [8].
2) Assuming that the current video data is being writ-
ten to the B SDRAM by FPGA, and an image data has
been stored in the A SDRAM, then FPGA should simul-
taneously transmitted data in the A SDRAM through the
FIFO to the DSP for corresponding processing.
DSP
SDRAM
CF Card
FPGA
In frared cam era
Visible camera FIFO
Figure 1. Embedded image proce ssing system based on DSP + FPGA.
SDRAM
CF Card
FPGA FIFO DSP
FIFO FIFO
FIFO FIFO
TVP5150
TVP5150
Infrared
camera
Visible
camera
Figure 2. The structure diagram of video data acquisition and storage.

F. QU ET AL. 577
3) The data should be transferred to SDRAM by
FPGA through the FIFO after being processed by DSP.
4) If the current data from DSP is stored to the D
SDRAM cache, and the C SDRAM has a data stored,
then the FPGA required data in the C SDRAM outpu t via
the encoder chip, and if DSP judges that the current vid-
eo needs to be saved, then it will be saved to the CF card
by FPGA.
The two cameras are all analog signals, so the infrared
camera should be synchronized on the basis of the visible
light camera. Two camera data will be captured and
stored to an SDRAM at the same time, and since the
video data needs to be cached before processing and
outputting, there will be three frame delays of outputs.
4.2. The Design of Ping-pong Operation in FPGA
According to the above description, in this article, the
most important ping-pong operation in the system is stu-
died, shown in Figure 4.
In the ping-pong operation, SDRAM write module
simply sustained write video data in the FIFO to the
SDRAM bus while SDRAM read module turns the video
data on the SDRAM bus to the input FIFO. Which
SDRAM read or written is decided by SDRAM bus arbi-
tration module. Figure 5 is the module code.
FPGA
CFADR[10:0]
CFDAT[15:0]
WE
OE
CE1
CE2
REG
CF Card
CFADR[10:0]
CFDAT[15:0]
WE
OE
CE1
CE2
REG
Figure 3. The hardware interface between FPGA and CF card.
FIFO
Write
SDRAM
The SDRAM bus arbitration
module
SDRAM
SDRAM
Read
SDRAM
FIFO
Video Output
Video Input
Figure 4. Pong operation procedures schematic.
Figure 5. SDRAM bus arbitr ation pr oc e dur e code.

F. QU ET AL.
578
5. Conclusions
In order to meet the need to capture and store video in
real-time in the ship photoelectric warning system, a
high-capacity acquisition and storage system is designed
based on FPGA. Using the FPGA speed features and
flexible configuration to capture the video data of the
infrared camera and the visible camera, and using the
FIFO method to guarantee asynchronous timing commu-
nication, also use of the advantages of SDRAM capacity
fast cache to save video data to CF card in real-time by
ping-pong operation. The tests at sea show that the sys-
tem can effectively store the emergencies video integ rity,
and play a crucial role as the ship photoelectric warning
system.
6. Acknowledgements
F. J. Q would like to thank Dr. Li Chun at our department
for many helpful suggestions and discussions; this work
is partly supported by the program of academy-locality
cooperation of the Chinese Academy of Sciences and the
Jilin province science and technology development plan
item.
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