A Low-Cost, Tiled Embedded Smart Camera System for Computer Vision Applications

In this demonstration, we present a low-resolution smart camera node with a custom-designed image sensor chip and peer-to-peer networking capabilities. Each camera can perform focal plane processing, and also has the computational power of the embedded controllers. Cameras can send data, such as results of image processing and feature extraction, over a peer-to-peer network. The distributed nature of such a system allows for increased scalability and robustness, and decreased bandwidth requirement over conventional server based systems. In our ongoing work, these lower-cost embedded smart cameras are being tiled instead of fabricating a higher-resolution sensor as a single chip. In our paper, we provide a detailed comparison of fabricating a higher-resolution sensor as a single chip and tiling lower-resolution embedded smart cameras in order to give motivation, and demonstrate the advantages. The comparison is made in terms of bandwidth, clock frequency, area, power, cost and global computations.