A Focal Plane Architecture for Motion Computation

A new Focal Plane Architecture for Motion Computation is presented. The design is based on the Smart Sensor paradigm: combining transduction and early processing at sensor level. The sensor computes focal plane motion and direction in a subsampled space, with programmable spatiotemporal bandwidth. The architecture is designed around an array of neuromorphic analog processing cells with local photo-transduction, computation of temporal variations in the image and correlation between neighbor pixels. The inherent process of serial read-out is used for further integration of low-level processing and reduction of complexity of each pixel. An external dedicated digital processor controls the system, interprets, and integrates the information from sets of four processing pixels in order to create a motion-based medium-level description of the image. The approach developed for VLSI implementation offers an excellent combination of small pixel area and a computationally efficient method for image motion measurement. The architecture is being implemented in a standard 1.5 μm CMOS process.