On sensor image compression for high pixel rate imaging

We propose a novel concept of an integration of compression and sensing in order to enhance performance of the image sensor. By integrating compression function onto the sensor focal plane, the image signal that has to be readout from the sensors is significantly reduced. The integration can consequently results in the increasing the pixel rate of the sensor. Thus, the proposed sensors can be potentially applied to high pixel rate imaging such as high resolution image sensing and high frame rate image sensing. The compression scheme we make use of is conditional replenishment that detects and encodes moving areas. In this paper, we introduce design and implementation of two architectures for on sensor compression; one is pixel parallel approach and the other is column parallel approach. We prototyped an VLSI chip of the proposed sensor based on the pixel parallel architecture and we describe the details of the results of the experiments obtained by the prototype chip.