High speed CMOS vision chips

This paper presents novel high speed vision chips based on multiple levels of parallel processors. The chip integrates CMOS image sensor, multiple-levels of SIMD parallel processors and an embedded microprocessor unit. The multiple-levels of SIMD parallel processors consist of an array processor of SIMD processing elements (PEs) and a column of SIMD row processors (RPs). The PE array and RPs have an O(N×N) parallelism and an O(N) parallelism, respectively. The PE array, RPs and MPU can execute low-, mid- and high-level image processing algorithms, respectively. Prototype chips are fabricated using the 0.18μm CMOS process. Applications including target tracking, pattern extraction and image recognition are demonstrated.