Rapid Prototyping Platform Reduces Development Time for ADAS Algorithms by up to 70 Percent
SAN JOSE, Calif., February 29, 2016—Hiroshima University and Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CDNS) today announced that Hiroshima University ported its traffic sign recognition algorithms to the Cadence® Protium™ rapid prototyping platform and reduced its automotive Advanced Driver Assistance Systems (ADAS) algorithm development time by up to 70 percent. The Hiroshima University’s research team, led by Associate Prof. Koide of the Research Institute for Nanodevice and Bio Systems (RNBS), focused its efforts on achievements in traffic sign recognition algorithms.
Some of the major causes of the increasing number of traffic accidents are driver misjudgments and operational errors.
Recently, the use of ADAS to reduce accidents has been attracting a lot of attention, and these systems are quickly becoming one of the most rapidly adopted automotive applications today. The RNBS research team at Hiroshima University has conducted research on the development of embedded systems for ADAS, which used vehicle cameras to detect speed and recognize road signs to provide information to drivers in real time to reduce accidents.
The newly developed traffic sign recognition system is comprised of three processing parts: Rectangular Pattern Matching (RPM), Circle Detection (CD), and Number Recognition (NR), and it works even in difficult conditions—at night time, in the rain or with tilted and deformed signs. In the first phase of the design project, system bring-up time was reduced by implementing RPM using the Protium rapid prototyping platform and conducting hardware/software co-debugging.
The FPGA-based Protium rapid prototyping platform, part of the Cadence System Development Suite, is designed for early, pre-silicon software development and significantly improves productivity by reducing prototype bring-up time from months to weeks compared to competitive solutions. Early in the University’s research, the Protium rapid prototyping platform demonstrated its robust capabilities with the development of the complex image processing system prototype.
“We’ve been closely collaborating with Cadence on the adoption of the Protium rapid prototyping platform in order to significantly accelerate the development of our traffic sign recognition algorithms,” said Associate Prof. Koide in RNBS at Hiroshima University. “The Protium rapid prototyping platform enabled us to improve our productivity so that we could keep our focus on the development of the traffic sign recognition algorithms.”
“With a fully automatic implementation flow, the Protium rapid prototyping platform provided high performance that was further optimized with user-driven optimizations, essential for early software development at Hiroshima University,” said Dr. Nobuo Tamba, technology group director at Cadence in Japan. “By collaborating with the University team, we are contributing to advance the innovation in the area of ADAS algorithms.”
