Putting it All Together
Figure 5 shows the entire FPGA-based system.

Figure 5. A Complete HD Surveillance System based on an Altera Cyclone III Development Platform

The system is composed of three boards:
An Altera Cyclone III FPGA Development Board – with a 3C120 device
An Aptina 5MPixel Sensor Module
An EyeLytics Adapter that connects the Aptina sensor with  the Cyclone III FPGA development platform

A demo design showing the camera sensor images being encoded and streamed through the network to a PC is available.

The entire design takes about 50,000 logic elements (LEs) with the Encoder Module using approximately 30,000 LEs when implementing a main profile H.264 encoding for a 720p/30 video stream.

The FPGA Advantage
Surveillance systems are not alike, this is especially true with HD surveillance systems. Systems designed for homeland security will be different than the ones used in casinos, even though they both employ HD camera sensors.

An FPGA-based architecture is completely flexible and customizable, while at the same time offering the peace of mind of being implemented on a standard, well-understood silicon platform. The system architecture described in this article can be enhanced and modified to suit different system requirements. Increasing the camera resolution or adding custom video processing or video analytics engine is easy since the design is implemented with standard HDL.

The H.264 Encoder Module supports multi-channel encoding, and streams with different resolutions enabling frame rate videos to be encoded at the same time.

Also since the design can be targeted to any FPGA, adopting an open design allows you to target the newest FPGA, thus receiving the higher performance and lower cost/power ratios as newer FPGAs are introduced.