On-board image processing

Hi all, I am trying to get a little robot car to do on-board image processing.

So far my plans are as follows:

  • microcontroller (ardiuno uno) to sync up the camera, SRAM memory and DSP chip(s)
  • DSP chips will perform image processing algorithms and return result(s) to microcontroller
  • camera is a very small CMOS type (6mm x 6mm x 4.5mm)

Thoughts:

  • feed the 8 bit data stream from the camera into a 1Mx8 bits (8Mbit total memory)
  • storage of 640x480 images (so I need 921600 locations of 8 bit storage)
  • address line will be controlled by the microcontroller

DSP Chips:

  • I have never worked with these before, is it similar to FPGA development?
  • I still have to look into my DSP chip needs (multipliers, clock speed and on-chip memory are the most important?)

I have never done this before, does this sound like a reasonable effort that will not be too hard to debug or verify?

Thanks