The main reason for the explosion in the use of DSP today is that it enhances existing products at low cost and opens doors to new products never before possible. Advances in DSP processors offer tremendous low-cost computing capability . DSP is less expensive than the traditional analog signal processing for sensor output processing. Advances in DSP algorithms have contributed to the variety of applications possible.
The state-of-the-art in DSP is real-time video recognition and tracking. Recent advances in DSP hardware provide 2 billion processing operations per second in a single device. This throughput is sufficient to fully process 30 frames per second of fine resolution video (over 8 million pixels per second to be processed).
For example, robots used in manufacturing pose a significant safety hazard to persons in the area. If TV cameras cover the area in which the robot moves, a real-time video DSP system can shut the robot down if a safety problem arises. The DSP system recognizes and tracks both the robot arm and any person's bodies (including limbs) in 3D with two or more cameras. The DSP processor uses both location and velocity of the objects to predict when the robot could collide with a person. If the time-to-collision nears the robot's shut-down time, it is shut down.
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