The introduction of the PC and the increasing functionality of integrated circuits created a new market for PC-based single-board computers, frame grabbers, I/O peripherals, graphics, and communications boards—the building blocks of today’s embedded electronics and machine vision systems. Today, the choice of boards, form factors, and functionality is numerous and includes products based on OpenVPX, VME, CompactPCI, cPCI Express, PC 104, PC/104 Plus, EPIC, EBX, and COM Express standards.
Embedded vision can take two tracks: open small-form-factor image processing boards and peripherals based on these computing platforms and aforementioned standards, or custom designs that use cameras, processors, frame grabbers, I/O peripherals, and software. While the hardware of open embedded vision systems may be relatively easy to reverse engineer, custom embedded vision designs are more complex, highly proprietary, and may use custom-designed CMOS imagers and custom Verilog hardware description language (HDL) embedded in FPGAs and ASICs.