Empower Technologies, a provider of embedded system development platform for LEOs, announced that Pixon Imaging, a company that develops and manufactures advanced image-processing hardware and software, has selected Empower's SBC6446 single board computer as a platform for their proprietary imaging software. 

According to the company, the proprietary and patented algorithms, some originally developed for demanding astronomical imaging applications, allow a level of image dehazing, deblurring, contrast enhancement, sharpening, and signal-to-noise ratio enhancement, all without generating artifacts, in real time.

"We are extremely impressed and excited to see the revolutionary functionality of Pixon Imaging's software running on our SBC6446 signal processing computer," said Paul Leung, Empower President and CEO. "Frankly, these imaging algorithms ported to our SBC6446 bring out the unique capabilities of our board in a way nothing else we have seen comes even close. More impressively, all these image processing functions take place in real time."

Leung added that while the scientific and military applications for this product pair are obvious, the industrial applications in such areas as intelligent security/surveillance, broadcast video and industrial machine vision, to name a few, are no less impressive. "We are especially looking forward to partnering with Pixon Imaging in developing their next-generation products."

"The Empower Technologies SBC6446 greatly accelerated our product development cycle," said Skip Powers, Pixon Imaging Vice President. "We were able to deliver a state-of-the-art system-level product without getting bogged down in board-level design and low-level software development."

According to the company, the Empower Technologies SBC6446 single board computer is based on the Texas Instruments (TI) TMS320DM6446 digital media processor based on DaVinci technology. This media processor is a dual-core processor based on TI's C64x+ digital signal processor (DSP) and ARM9 core plus a video and imaging co-processor that offloads many video and imaging processing functions from the DSP core leaving more DSP MIPs available for video and imaging algorithms.

"It is exciting to see how TI's DaVinci technology is enabling the delivery of exciting new products to the market," said Charlie Gonsalves, marketing manager for TI's Developer Network. "In this case, the Pixon software running on the Empower SBC6446 Application Specific Module exhibits how image processing power, like real-time contrast enhancement and dehazing, is made possible on a single board. Even while doing all these functions on real-time video, the utilization of the DSP core on the DM6446 was less than 30 percent and the ARM9 core utilization was even considerably less, which demonstrates that this processor can easily allow for the addition of other functionalities as needed, like noise reduction and image stabilization."