VLSI implementation of an application-specific vision chip for overtake monitoring, real time eye tracking, and automated visual inspection

With regard to application-specific constraints such as size, power consumption, and price, many real time vision tasks are still too demanding for today's state-of-the-art hardware. This is especially true for purely digital hardware systems. As an interesting alternative, we investigated the implementation of smart vision algorithms by an application-specific vision chip featuring combined analog and digital processing. The analog part implements computationally intensive operations in a massively parallel array, which allows to realize the remaining operations by a reduced complexity dedicated digital processor. This paper reports on the systematic design and VLSI implementation of dedicated vision chips for automotive image processing, eye tracking, and visual inspection.