Early Vision on the Focal-Plane with High Dynamic Range Pixels

This paper introduces a high dynamic range pixel for early vision processing. Early vision is the first stage to subsequently extract semantic information for image processing or video analytics. This paper proposes to bring said processing to the focal plane, next to a high dynamic range image sensor working on the principle of lateral overflow capacitor. This brings the benefits of processing scenes with a wide dynamic range in a power efficient manner. Circuit simulations for edge detection, as an example of early vision processing conveyed in this paper, show that our proposal meets the accuracy typically found in applications like machine vision. Simulations are in XFAB’s XS018 technology.