Real Time Parallel Image Processing Using a Silicon Retina and FPGA Circuits

Abstract

We fabricated a novel vision system consisting of an analog very large scale integrated(VLSI)vision sensor,namely a silicon retina,and field programmable gate array(FPGA)circuits.The silicon retina executes Laplacian-Gaussian-like spatial filtering and subtraction of consecutive frames with its built-in analog integrated circuit.The output images of the silicon retina are fed into the FPGA circuits that perform further image processing using parallel circuit architecture.Using this system,contours of objects and their direction of motion were extracted within a single-frame sampling-time of the silicon retina(<20ms in indoor illumination)with low computation cost(<10k gates of FPGA circuits).The system is compact and has low power consumption(<2.75W),and is therefore suitable for robotic vision.