Real-time vision chips

The author first reviews several examples of digital and analog vision chips and then discusses research trends. Particular attention is given to the digital image correlation chip, the analog image smoothing chip and the analog edge detection chip. It is pointed out that interest in vision chips is increasing because vision chip approaches have potential for high speed, low cost, low power consumption and small physical size, compared to conventional visual processing approaches based on combinations of general-purpose microcomputers and application programs. Analog vision chips have a shorter history than digital vision chips, and a large portion of analog vision chip research was devoted to proving that analog chips can do visual processing tasks which can also be carried out by digital chips. The next goal for analog vision chips would include showing some examples in which the analog approaches can perform better than the digital approaches. A mix of application-oriented and biology-oriented approaches may occur in the near future