The demand for image processing in future devices continues to grow exponentially. One prime example is the security camera and surveillance market, currently worth $25B. It is expected to grow at 13% CAGR to $45B by the year 2025, with roughly a quarter of that in consumer smart home cameras. There are around a billion cameras installed globally. It is estimated that the next billion cameras will be installed in a period of just 4 years. Arm is extending its ISP product portfolio and announcing the latest entrant to the Arm Mali camera family, Arm Mali-C55: the smallest and highest-performance Image Signal Processor (ISP) from Arm to date.
Addressing a wide range of image-processing use cases
Mali-C55 offers the most efficient combination of image quality, high throughput, power consumption, and silicon area. It can enable a broad range of applications including endpoint AI, smart home cameras, AR/VR, and smart displays. It can meet the expanding needs of vision applications for wired or battery powered devices at different power envelopes in challenging lighting and weather conditions. Mali-C55 can be seamlessly integrated in SoC designs with either Cortex-A or Cortex-M CPUs as it includes industry standard AXI and AHB interfaces. Mali-C55 offers a wide range of configurability options, providing the most area-efficient implementation to support targeted use cases. It also comes with improved image quality due to updates to the color reproduction and noise reduction functions, and has higher performance with up to 1.2Gpix/sec throughput.
Supporting high-quality image output
Building on the class-leading Mali-C52 ISP, the new Mali-C55 image signal processor supports applications requiring high-quality image output by providing enhancements of the following functions:
Arm Iridix local tone mapping
Arm Temper temporal noise reduction
Arm Sinter spatial noise reduction
High Dynamic Range (HDR) sensors support
Iridix local tone mapping is the process of applying intensity transformations to images to achieve better visualization by using information gathered from local regions within images. Temper is a temporal noise reduction algorithm that improves the quality of images in low light conditions by combining consecutive frames. Sinter 2.6 is an improved spatial noise reduction technique that improves the detail and noise balance in color channels. The Temper and Sinter functional blocks were designed to work together for a significantly better image quality by sharing information between the modules to apply stronger noise reduction in various regions.
Enhancing ML processing capabilities
Mali-C55 provides a second output pipe that can output downscaled images suitable for input to any machine learning accelerator. Pairing an ISP with a machine learning accelerator adds ML capabilities to the image-processing pipeline by being able to use other transformer models as denoising techniques, which further enhances image quality. Mali-C55 also enables integration with other products such as Arm Frame Buffer Compression (AFBC) and Arm Mali-C10 Geometric Distortion Correction (GDC).
Improved multiple image processing
Mali-C55 can support up to 8 inputs, resulting in up to 48Mpixel / 8K resolution, meeting the requirements of a wide range of consumer, commercial and industrial vision system applications.
Software and tools support
Arm provides a complete software package for Mali-C55 licensees for controlling the functions of the ISP. Arm tools help developers to achieve the desired image quality, which is paramount for vision devices. Specialized tuning training courses and support for tailored tuning are also offered.
Delivering on the Arm Total Solutions for IoT roadmap
Mali-C55 will be included in upcoming Total Solutions for IoT – starting with a full reference design for vision systems. The Mali-C55 image signal processor will come with a pre-validated solution that will support a specific sensor and dual output mode, seamlessly connecting to a machine learning accelerator that performs various functions.
Summary
The Mali-C55 ISP is the next step in the evolution of Arm’s imaging products, enabling partners to offer market leading products in the smart camera space with significantly upgraded performance and efficiency. Find out more about the capabilities of the Mali-C55 image signal processor and reach out to Arm for support with your next vision-based SoC design.
Learn More about Mali-C55