HDR-ARtiSt: an adaptive real-time smart camera for high dynamic range imaging

This paper describes a complete FPGA-based smart camera architecture named HDR-ARtiSt (High Dynamic Range Adaptive Real-time Smart camera) which produces a real-time high dynamic range (HDR) live video stream from multiple captures. A specific memory management unit has been defined to adjust the number of acquisitions to improve HDR quality. This smart camera is built around a standard B&W CMOS image sensor and a Xilinx FPGA. It embeds multiple captures, HDR processing, data display and transfer, which is an original contribution compared to the state-of-the-art. The proposed architecture enables a real-time HDR video flow for a full sensor resolution (1.3 Mega pixels) at 60 frames per second.