Enclustra FPGA Solutions | Creating 3D City Maps at 300 km/h

Creating 3D City Maps at 300 km/h

All six 150 Megapixel Cameras as well as the two LIDAR are connected to an Enclustra Mercury+ XU8.

The Leica CityMapper-2 generates 3D maps of cities in one run. Mounted on an airplane that flies at up to 300 km/h over the city, it records all data to generate accurate 3D data. Six 150 MP cameras and a LiDAR synchronized with the lowest possible jitter take an image every 0.9 seconds. The image data is stored to four SSDs on a host PC running Windows 10 – notably a non-real-time operating system.

The image data is transferred via a SLVS-EC (Scalable Low-Voltage Signaling with Embedded Clock) high-speed interface to an Enclustra Mercury+ XU8 SOM and temporarily stored in the SDRAM. Each sensor is connected to it's own SOM. The host PC then initiates the DMA engine of the Enclustra FPGA Manager PCIe IP Solution which transfers all the data through PCIe to the host PC without any further action from the host CPU, thus minimizing the CPU load.

Also integrated into the Enclustra Mercury+ XU8 SOM is a preview function. On a display the pilot or operator can check the image quality during the flight while the application is on mission and make sure the image data is collected correctly.Processing the data stream of almost 2 GBytes/swithout any frame drops is a very ambitious task. If you would like to find out more about this exciting customer project, you can read the whole story .

Read the whole story: Creating 3D City Maps at 300 km/h