• Journal of the Korea Society for Simulation
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.73-82
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• 2009

Due to the many advantages including low price, low power consumption, and miniaturization, the CMOS camera has been utilized in many applications, including mobile phones, the automotive industry, medical sciences and sensoring, robotic controls, and research in the security field. In particular, the 360 degree omni-directional camera when utilized in multi-camera applications has displayed issues of software nature, interface communication management, delays, and a complicated image display control. Other issues include energy management problems, and miniaturization of a multi-camera in the hardware field. Traditional CMOS camera systems are comprised of an embedded system that consists of a high-performance MCU enabling a camera to send and receive images and a multi-layer system similar to an individual control system that consists of the camera's high performance Micro Controller Unit. We proposed the SL-AVS (Small Size/Low power Around-View System) to be able to control a camera while collecting image data using a high speed synchronization technique on the foundation of a single layer low performance MCU. It is an initial model of the omni-directional camera that takes images from a 360 view drawing from several CMOS camera utilizing a 110 degree view. We then connected a single MCU with four low-power CMOS cameras and implemented controls that include synchronization, controlling, and transmit/receive functions of individual camera compared with the traditional system. The synchronization of the respective cameras were controlled and then memorized by handling each interrupt through the MCU. We were able to improve the efficiency of data transmission that minimizes re-synchronization amongst a target, the CMOS camera, and the MCU. Further, depending on the choice of users, respective or groups of images divided into 4 domains were then provided with a target. We finally analyzed and compared the performance of the developed camera system including the synchronization and time of data transfer and image data loss, etc.