1 f ' 9 CHARGE - COUPLED COMPUTING FOR FOCAL PLANE IMAGE PREPROCESSING

1 • 26191'916_922,sep "mbe"987j. Abstract. A new class of charge-coupled devices called charge-coup led­ computing devices is described. These analog circuits perform arith­ Columbia University Department of Electrical Engineering metic functions such as addition, subtraction, and magnitude com­ parison in the charge domain. The circuits are compact and are designed 1312 Seeley W. Mudd Building to be insensitive to rail voltages, simplifying their utilization. These 520 W. 120th Street devices, in conjunction with input, output, and analog memory circuits, New York, New York 10027 can be combined to form a simple but general-purpose and fully pro­ grammable charge-coupled computer. A prototype charge-coupled com­ puter has been fabricated and tested. Prospects for forming a large array of computers (e.g., 1000 to 10,000) on a single chip for spatially parallel image preprocessing are discussed. Such image plane preprocessing of data would find use in real-time mobile robot vision systems, in which low power, lightweight computing is critical for economical viability. CONTENTS image array picture elements (pixels). Generally, these preprocessing functions consume the greatest portion of the