Towards design of a bridge to enable high speed image sensors for random access

Most commercially available image sensors send image data at high speed and pixel values can only be accessed sequentially in a row-by-row fashion. On the other hand, commercial microcontrollers run at slower speed compared to the high data-rate of the image sensors and many embedded system applications need random access of the pixel values. Besides, commercial microcontrollers do not have sufficient internal memory to store a complete image. In this paper, the design of a novel bridge is proposed to interface high speed image sensors in low power and low speed embedded systems. By using the proposed bridge, the image processor or microcontroller can capture and store an image in the bridge's internal memory. The pixel values can then be accessed in a random fashion through a parallel memory access interface at the desired speed. The bridge can be used in different embedded system applications such as pattern recognition, robotic vision, bio-medical imaging etc.