Situation

Automotive Dashcams have become a popular aftermarket item. Lately, they are going mainstream, and becoming a factory-installed option that can be ordered directly from the OEM.

We were contacted by a Tier 1 supplier while integrating dashcam functionality in their infotainment system for a German luxury OEM. The challenge was to manage an incoming video stream, compress video on the fly into MPEG 4, save it to a solid state hard drive and make the video available for other computer vision features – all without any negative effect on a wealth of other features running at the same time on this cutting-edge infotainment system.

 Activities

• We were able to leverage our extensive experience in handling video streams in Linux-based systems – and our experience in optimizing embedded code for use with a particular processor, which in this case was supplied by NVIDIA.
• We supported the Tier 1 in several on-site workshops and coordinated our work packages in daily calls.
• We optimized the embedded code to minimize time-consuming copy operations of image frames and maximize use of hardware acceleration available on the particular processor.
• The code we developed covers the dashcam functionality from low-level hardware-accelerated video compression to the functional logic such as managing video files in the Linux filesystem.

Results

The dashcam feature has been integrated smoothly within a complex framework of video applications and is getting ready to launch. Stay tuned for updates once the OEM officially announces the feature.