Methods and circuits for focal-plane computation of features in CMOS visual sensors

Feature detection, and tracking is a fundamental problem in computer vision research. By detecting and tracking features in an image sequence it is possible to recover information about both the motion of the viewer and the structure of the environment. The selection of features is a computationally intensive task. We derive two low-complexity algorithms that are suitable for integration in a CMOS sensor with focal-plane processing. We review the two algorithms and the circuits that implement them. We presents results from accurate simulations and experimental results from fabricated CMOS sensors.