ARINC661 Graphics Rendering Based on OpenVG and Its Use Cases with Wireless Communications

Abstract

ARINC 661 is a standard for the CDS (Cockpit Display Systems) defined by ARINC (Aeronautical Radio, Inc.) and used for application to communicate and display sensing data and information. ARINC 661 contains various two-dimensional GUI (Graphical User Interface) widget definitions. The widget set covers a variety of graphics elements including circles, arcs, crowns and others. Additionally, the symbol widgets provide rendering of user defined polygonal shapes which are typically described with triangle fans and triangle strips. ARINC 661 has various rendering features including text, image output, transformation of object and the halo effect which renders the outlines of graphics objects for highlighting. It is possible to use 3D graphics libraries like OpenGL and DirectX for implementation of graphics features. However those 3D graphics libraries are too heavy and over-powered to show 2D graphics primitives defined in ARINC 661. In this paper, we propose ARINC661 rendering based on OpenVG. OpenVG is a standard of 2D vector graphics API defined by the Khronos Group. OpenVG is designed for embedded system GUI rendering and its features are appropriate to implement ARINC661. Compare with OpenGL, OpenVG defined with fixed pipeline architecture without programmable shader. Therefore, OpenVG is cost effective to rendering and certification of software quality by reducing complexity of application source code. We also propose ARINC661 use cases for wireless application to communicate and display data from various sensor network, information gathered from unmanned aerial and land vehicles.