Design and Implementation of an Industrial 360° Surround View Camera System using IFM Hardware and Multi-Camera Image Processing

The presence of blind spots in industrial vehicles and mobile machinery creates considerable barriers to effective operator observation of surrounding people, machines and obstacles. The paper outlines the architecture and methods for the implementation of a 360° surround-view technology in industry through the comprehensive application of EcomatDisplay IFM, CODESYS visualization and several streams of video. The system suggested integrates IP cameras working through RTSP in Ethernet with a layer that coordinates the respective camera views and also with a multi-window visualizer. The research suggests to use Modbus TCP protocol to exchange information about the state of the machine with a vehicle controller in order to change layout accordingly to the state of the last in the course of operation (for instance, during the reverse motion). The publication covers such matters as hardware architecture, communication interfaces, video-stream management, dynamic window management and validation technique but suggests that there are no measurements regarding the actual latencies and resource usage defined in the sources and thus requiring verification through experiments.