graphic overlay

[jakebailey]

I was wondering if someone could point me in the right direction or give me an idea as to how feasible this is.

I want to have a simple graphic overlay onto a MIPI CSI video that is then encoded to h264 and streamed over the network. Something like a PNG with alpha that can be dynamically updated by application. I would prefer this to all be hardware accelerated to minimize power consumption and allow a low cost single core processor to be used. The application is to draw boxes over objects detected in an environment from a radar sensor (no image detection going on, camera is fixed in location)

I've tried to prototype this on a raspberry broadcom board and the h264 encoding and streaming works great with low cpu usage and low latency but any attempt to add a graphic overlay involves the cpu which quickly throttles everything.

[igorpadykov]

Hi Jake

one can look at usage various i.MX multimedia use cases included in

linux documentation (Lunux User Guide, sect.Multimedia) on link

i.MX Software|NXP 

Best regards
igor
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[marcomadrigal]

Hi,

I think this meets your requirements:

http://developer.ridgerun.com/wiki/index.php?title=Gstreamer_QT_Overlay 

You can pass any QT QML file to create your UI interface and control each qml object properties separately to update the UI. It uses GPU to blend the UI into the video stream for performance.

Best Regards,

-Marco

GStreamer Development | Embedded Linux Development | Linux SDK 

[jakebailey]

Thanks for the quick reply Marco. I assume from your signature that you are familiar with this linked software. Is this applicable to the lowest tier i.MX Solo processors (SOMs available around $50) when overlaying and h264 encoding 1080p@30fps? This looks quite suitable but I'd like to get a rough idea of the performance limits of the hardware so I can try to stay within budget. Also there is no mention of running headless while still applying graphic overlay to h264 stream but presumably this is possible?

[marcomadrigal]

Hi Jake,

We haven't tried it on the Solo yet, however you can request for an evaluation version and test whether it meets your requirements. 

Indeed, you can let the plugin running alone on the pipeline just overlaying a single image or a more complex qml file, interaction with an external application is only required if you need to change properties on the qml interface which is just a matter of changing a property on the plugin. 

Best Regards,

-Marco

www.ridgerun.com