COMPUTATIONAL IMAGE SENSOR FOR ON SENSOR COMPRESSION

We propose a novel integration of image compression and sensing in ord er to enhance the performance of an image sensor. By integrating a com pression function onto the sensor focal plane, the image signal to be read out from the sensor is significantly reduced and the pixel rate o f the sensor can consequently be increased. The potential applications of the proposed sensor are in high pixel-rate imaging, such as high f rame-rate image sensing and high-resolution image sensing. The compres sion scheme we employ is a conditional replenishment, which detects an d encodes moving areas. In this paper, we introduce two architectures for on-sensor compression; one is the pixel parallel approach and the other is the column parallel approach. We prototyped a VLSI chip of th e proposed sensor based on the pixel parallel architecture. We show th e design and describe the results of the experiments obtained by the p rototype chip.