A CMOS imager with focal plane compression

A focal plane video compression integrated circuit is presented. The design consists of a 128 times 128 pixel array and a bank of column-level processors. Each one of the column-level processors performs the tasks of image decorrelation, quantization, and entropy encoding. The chip provides at its output a compressed bit stream. The integration of the quantizer and the entropy encoder at the column level is possible by sharing circuitry between a single-slope analog-to-digital converter and a Golomb-Rice entropy encoder. In addition, the design includes a low-complexity algorithm for the adaptation of the Golomb-Rice coder to the statistics of the video signal. The design has been fully verified through simulations and has been implemented in a 0.35 mum CMOS technology. The chip layout occupies an area of 7 times 5 mm
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