On sensor image compression for high pixel rate imaging

Abstract

We propose a novel concept of an integration of compression and sensing in order to enhance performance of the image sensor. By integrating the compression function onto the sensor focal plane, the image signal that has to be readout from the sensor is significantly reduced. The integration consequently results in increasing the pixel rate of the sensor. Thus, the proposed sensors can be potentially applied to high pixel rate imaging such as high resolution image sensing and high frame rate image sensing. The compression scheme we make use of is conditional replenishment that detects and encodes moving areas. In this paper, we describe the design and implementation of two architectures for sensor compression; one is a pixel parallel approach and the other is a column parallel approach. We prototyped a VLSI chip of the proposed sensor based on the pixel parallel architecture and we describe the details of the results of the experiments obtained by the prototype chip.