Camera with stm32F7

[emil28]

Is it possible to have good qualities video (1080p, or 4k) using a camera and the DCMI port of the STM32F7 ? I would like to make my own board using an F7 and a camera, then stream the video to my phone using Wifi or an Ethernet cable, but I am afraid that even an F7 is not powerful enough to process high quality images.

Do you have some references of camera I can use ?

Thanks.

[Ahmed Tolba]

That's not an answer, but you have to check how much ram that MCU can afford, for 1080p you need 1920×1080*4 Memory = >8MB per frame. You need a very fast CPU to process 8MB per frame, and a fast bus system that fetches data from the CAMERA to the Main Memory, then to the CPU to process it and display it at more than 8MHz bus system. Plus you can use Hardware Decoders or Encoders to encode/decode your stream for faster processing, because 8MB Raw data is too much so you need an MPEAG Encoder and Decode on the CPU or on a HARDWARE...

[emil28]

Thanks for your answer !

You're right, STM32F7 only have 1024 kBytes of RAM, that's clearly not enough for my project :/.

[Tesla DeLorean]

Well it's more than that, you're going to need to have a lot of bandwidth to do anything while you drink from the fire hose.

There are several H7 DISCO boards with large SDRAM and camera interface connectors, but I still think these will be underwhelming for the resolutions being discussed. You really need a whole different class of CPU, and HW assistance for the processing and plumbing.

[Tesla DeLorean]

Perhaps you should be looking a 1K/4K Security cameras which already provide Ethernet with PoE and/or WiFi

[Piranha]

https://openmv.io/products/openmv-cam-m7

https://embedded-vision-st.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

I don't know if these pull out the limits, but should be close to that.

[emil28]

Ok, that's clear, a micrcontroller is not suited for my application. Do you think a microprocessor can be used for this kind of application ? In the datasheet of the STM32MP153A, it is written that the camera interface "can achieve a data transfer rate up to 140 Mbyte/s using a 80 MHz pixel clock and 14-bit of data".

Microprocessors look much more difficult to use, but it can be interesting to learn :)

[emil28]

Hi,

I think I will use a microprocessor STM32MP1 for my project. Is it powerful enough to manage a webcam ?