On sensor image compression

In this paper, we propose a novel image sensor which compresses image signals on the sensor plane. Since an image signal is compressed on the sensor plane by making use of the parallel nature of image signals, the amount of signal read out from the sensor can be significantly reduced. Thus, the potential applications of the proposed sensor are high pixel rate cameras and processing systems which require very high speed imaging or very high resolution imaging. The very high bandwidth is the fundamental limitation to the feasibility of those high pixel rate sensors and processing systems. Conditional replenishment is employed for the compression algorithm. In each pixel, current pixel value is compared to that in the last replenished frame. The value and the address of the pixel are extracted and coded if the magnitude of the difference is greater than a threshold. Analog circuits have been designed for processing in each pixel. A first prototype of a VLSI chip has been fabricated. Some results of experiments obtained by using the first prototype are shown in this paper.