Abstract

ABSTRACT CMOS VLSI imaging sensors are described, which employ a novel approach to image acquisition and processing. Principles of biological visual systems, such as adaptation and selective attention, are applied to achieve a high performance imaging system. The Adaptive Sensitivity mechanism enables the acquisition of extremely wide dynamic range, much wider than that of conventional semicon­ ductor sensors, while preserving image details and while dynamically adapting to the image contents. The Intelligent Scan mechanism filters in only the areas of interest, thus reducing the amount of transmitted visual data in an intelligent, image-dependent, adaptive manner, The sensor are complemented with an image processing system, described in a companion paper. 1. INTRODUCTION The principles of organization of biological vision systems provide a most valuable inspiration to the design and construction of intelligent technological vision systems. Consider the fundamental task of image acquisition with high resolution over wide field-of-view. Man-made visual systems, even while employing the most powerful available supercomputers or parallel processors, cannot acquire and manipulate on-line the bit rate of 109 bit per second necessary under the circumstances [1, 2, 3], Yet, biological systems with very limited resources, comprising slow components operating on a time scale of milliseconds, can process this enormous bit rate, and are more than capable of multidimensional pro­ cessing in this environment.We seek to gain some insight into these mechanisms, in order to better design efficient visual data acquisition and processing systems. In this paper we focus on two relatively well understood mechan­ isms of collection and selection of visual data, namely Adaptive Sensitivity combining nonlinear pro­ cessing and multilevel feedback loops, and selective acquisition and processing implementing a non- uniform scheme of computational resources allocation, and outline the design of a family of VLSI based sensors which exploit these biological principles of organization [4, 5, 6, 7],

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