Adaptive Sampling for Low Latency Vision Processing

In this paper we describe a close-to-sensor low latency visual processing system. We show that by adaptively sampling visual information, low level tracking can be achieved at high temporal frequencies with no increase in bandwidth and using very little memory. By having close-to-sensor processing, image regions can be captured and processed at millisecond sub-frame rates. If spatiotemporal regions have little useful information in them they can be discarded without further processing. Spatiotemporal regions that contain ‘interesting’ changes are further processed to determine what the interesting changes are. Close-to-sensor processing enables low latency programming of the image sensor such that interesting parts of a scene are sampled more often than less interesting parts. Using a small set of low level rules to define what is interesting, early visual processing proceeds autonomously. We demonstrate system performance with two applications. Firstly, to test the absolute performance of the system, we show low level visual tracking at millisecond rates and secondly a more general recursive Baysian tracker.