Image sensor color calibration using Zynq-7000 SoC

Image sensors are used in a wide range of applications, from cell phones and video surveillance products to automobiles and missile systems. Almost all of these applications require white-balance correction (also referred to as color correction) in order to produce images with colors that appear correct to the human eye regardless of the type of illumination—daylight, incandescent, fluorescent and so on.

Implementing automatic white-balance correction in a programmable logic device such as a Xilinx FPGA or Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC is likely to be a new challenge for many developers who have used ASIC or ASSP devices previously. Let’s look at how software running on an embedded processor, such as an ARM9 processing system on the Zynq-7000 All Programmable SoC, can control custom image- and video-processing logic to perform real-time pixel-level color/white-balance correction.

To set the stage for how this is done, it’s helpful to first examine some basic concepts of color perception and camera calibration.