A low cost, intelligent micro-camera for surveillance

This paper describes an ultra-miniature intelligent camera system which converts light directly into processed digital data. The micro-camera comprises the following component parts, a camera, processing interface and a pipelined processing architecture. The processing resources have been configured to optimise the performance of computationally intensive routines such as image encoding. The micro-camera can be utilised in many application areas as a consequence of its user programmability. Software has been written to illustrate the versatility of the system. At present this software includes programs which perform image enhancement, image compression and motion detection