An image sensor with fast extraction of objects´ positions - rough vision processor

An integration of the signal processing circuits with the image acquiring device, which is called the vision chip and can process information in parallel, is proposed for fast image processing. In applications for robot vision, not only the detailed information, such as shape or texture, but also the rough information, such as ´something is around here´, are important and useful. We consider the detecting of centroids of objects in the focal plain as the rough vision processing, which is useful in practical application, and describe its implementation using two components; the centroid detector and the coordinate generator. First, we describe the fast flag generation algorithm indicating the centroid of objects, and its implementation using an analog parallel signal processing architecture. Next, we describe a novel encoding algorithm for flag positions indicating the centroids in order to obtain their coordinates