Advantages of Selective Change-Driven Vision for Resource-Limited Systems

Selective change-driven (SCD) vision is a capture/processing strategy especially suited for vision systems with limited resources and/or vision applications with real-time constraints. SCD vision capture essentially involves delivering only the pixels that have undergone the greatest change in illumination since the last time they were read-out. SCD vision processing involves processing a limited pixel flow with similar results to the usual image flow, but with far lower bandwidth and processing requirements. SCD vision is based on pixel flow processing instead of traditional image flow processing. This complete change in the way video is processed and has a direct impact on the processing hardware required to deal with visual information. In this paper, we present the first CMOS sensor using the SCD strategy, along with a highly resource-limited system implementing an object tracking experiment. Results show that SCD vision outperforms traditional vision systems by at least one order of magnitude, with limited hardware requirements for the specific tracking experiment being tested.