State-of-the-art license plate recognition for intelligent traffic cameras and 360 degree surround view

Lattice Semiconductor has announced the implementation of its ECP5 FPGA into embedded vision applications for smart surveillance and automotive applications at the Edge. Reinforcing the company’s commitment to the industrial and automotive markets, the company’s ECP5 family of low power, small form factor FPGAs enables CPU acceleration for license plate detection and image enhancement in intelligent traffic cameras. In addition, their ECP5 FPGA enables the integration of image stitching and 3D merging for ADAS 360 surround view systems. ITS, including traffic flow monitoring, traffic violations identification, smart parking, and toll collection are a key part of the vision of tomorrow’s Smart Cities. Such systems typically require intelligent traffic cameras that can accurately detect many aspects of a vehicle, such as license plates, even in harsh environments, to perform video analytics at the Edge, rather than sending raw video streams back to the Cloud. Microsharp is one such company that offers intelligent traffic cameras with up to 95 percent license plate recognition rate. “When seeking a partner to collaborate on our intelligent traffic camera, we were looking for a scalable, low power solution to ensure flawless real-time license plate image capture,” said Ting Zhou, CEO of Microsharp. “Lattice’s ECP5 FPGA was a natural fit, allowing us to take advantage of the product’s energy efficient image enhancement and processing capabilities to accelerate the development of our intelligent camera.”