3D Surround View / 360° Bird View
Licensable software library and application framework for embedded platforms
Top View and – more advanced – 360° Bird View Systems are well established in premium- and mid-class passenger cars and see growing demand in off-road vehicles such as construction machines, agricultural vehicles, transportation vehicles, military vehicles and even ground-based drones – often in combination with AI object detection systems. The challenges for 360° Bird View Systems in the latter market are different from those of the typical automotive market, e.g.:
- More than four cameras might be needed to cover the field of interest of the target vehicle, potentially even different camera types or cameras with different Field of Views (FOVs).
- The vehicles are complexly shaped so that the cameras often need to be mounted at – from the viewing perspective – difficult positions, usually unsymmetrically and at different heights.
- The cameras may need to be mounted at moving parts of the vehicle (at the arm of a reach stacker or at both parts of an articulated vehicle).
- The required flexibility in the number, types and positions for the cameras combined with many vehicle variants requires a very efficient process for camera calibration.
- Standards and system topology are different for all kinds of off-road vehicle types and vendors.
The TES 3D Surround View (3DSV) software is developed to cope with these challenges and optimized over more than a decade by continuously integrating experiences from the field and with a variety of embedded target platforms and systems. 3DSV is a modular, feature rich and platform agnostic software and can handle an unlimited number of cameras of different types.
Besides the well-known Top View or Bird View, a single viewing perspective from exactly above the vehicle, 3DSV supports any viewer position and viewing angle from outside of the vehicle, i.e. full 360° Surround View. The viewing position can be changed on-the-fly or by selecting one of several predefined viewing positions.
3DSV supports flexible screen layouts – switchable at runtime, e.g. switching from full-screen mode to a multi-window mode showing dedicated positions around the vehicle depending on the driving situation.
The vehicle installation is supported by TES’ extremely efficient 3DSV auto-calibration process, which allows to determine the camera mounting positions (extrinsics) within a few minutes. In addition, 3DSV offers a variety of stitching algorithms to cope with difficult camera positions and viewing scenarios, and flexible methods to optimize observer positions.
The 3DSV architecture and interfaces are designed to allow easy porting to embedded target platforms and integration with industry standard software stacks, camera pipelines and window systems. By supporting gstreamer as input interface for the cameras, the integration of new or additional camera types becomes only a matter of configuration rather than software engineering. However, gstreamer support is an optional feature and not a strict requirement. The modular design makes it easy to implement additional camera interfaces. On the output side various window systems as well as the option for gstreamer output are supported – the latter allowing sending the output scene to remote displays via a network.
3D Surround View - Observer Positions
3D Surround View - Splitscreen Mode
Video - Efficient Autocalibration
The multi-platform architecture allows porting to any operating system and the modular design enables the integration of any type of camera.
So far supported Processors:
- Intel x86
- NVidia Tegra, Jetson
- NXP i.MX6, i.MX8, S32V234
- Raspberry Pi
- Renesas R-Car H3 and M3, RZ/V2H, RZ/V2N
- Texas Instruments TDA4 and AM62P
- Xilinx Zynq Ultrascale
- Qualcom Snapdragon SA8155
So far supported Operation Systems:
- Linux
- Windows
Eval kit and more information: Please contact graphics@tes-dst.com
Reference Customers / Products:
3D Surround View on CCpilot - Customizable Smart Display Solution
With the CCpilot displays CrossControl combines powerful computation platforms with an open software stack that supports our TSV library to provide a ready-to-use HMI- and computing-solution that allows customers to meet the needs of a wide spectrum of machines and applications.
360° Surround View System LiXplore® Bird's Eye
Alexander Bertsch, Head of Industrial Sensors at Liebherr: “The size and extreme environmental conditions in which mobile machines are used place particular demands on camera systems for them. We are grateful for the excellent cooperation with TES. It has enabled us to adapt the software of our 360° Surround View system step by step to the needs of our users and customers. The result is a system that perfectly meets the needs of the industry.”
Thomas Hase, Senior Business Development Manager at TES: “Integrating TSV into Liebherr’s LiXplore was a very encouraging and fruitful cooperation. Due to the broad usage spectrum of LiXplore on all kind of vehicles several vehicle-specific challenges for an optimal 360° system were identified during machine-setup. Those were addressed in an innovative cooperation of both companies’ engineers resulting in significant improvements of the TES’ TSV software and a highly flexible and powerful LiXplore 360° Surround View System.”
HPX.ai-vision platform featuring 3D Surround View
With the HPX.ai-vision, Sensor Technik Wiedemann (STW) provides a powerful, versatile, and highly customizable multi-processor platform targeting environment detection and process automation for mobile machines. Integrated AI algorithms efficiently process data from camera, lidar and radar sensors. Detected objects can be highlighted in the 3D Surround View scene.
Sensor Technik Wiedemann HPX.ai-vision - English Product Website
Sensor Technik Wiedemann HPX.ai-vision - German Product Website
Press-Release (2025-09-11): STW relies on TES Electronic Solutions software to implement dynamic bird's-eye view systems
3D Surround View - Reference Design on Renesas RZ/V2H SMARC SoM
Turn-Key design for your own Embedded Vision ECU or Smart Display!
TESSOLVE RZ/V2H Renesas solutions Website
TESSOLVE RZ/V2H 3D Surround View Demo at AIX 2025 show on YouTube
3D Surround View Turn-Key Solution on Apalis i.MX6 SoM
Ready to use 3D Surround View System solution with 4 Ethernet cameras.