Smart Vision Sensors: Analog VLSI Systems for Integrated Image Acquisition and Early Vision Processing

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Wyatt The primary goal of this research is to design and test analog VLSI systems for applications of real-time machine vision. In real-time machine vision the sheer volume of image data to be acquired, managed and processed leads to communications bottlenecks between imagers, memory and processors, and to very high computational demands. The goal is to determine how the advantages of analog VLSI--high speed, low power and small area-- can be exploited and its disadvantages--limited accuracy, inflexibility and lack of storage capacity--can be minimized. The work is concentrated on early vision tasks, i.e., tasks that occur early in the signal flow path of animal or machine. Proposed designs include chips for camera velocity estimation, depth from stereo, image segmentation and smoothing, surface reconstruction, wide-range brightness adaptive imaging, and automatic fiducial mark alignment for wafer fabrication. MIT's earlier designs have shown that the typical subsystem is physically very small and will perform one or more computationally intensive image-processing tasks at hundreds-to- thousands of frames per second using only tens-to-hundreds of milliwatts.