Low Power Processors and Image Sensors for Vision-Based IoT Devices: A Review

With the advancements of the Internet of Things (IoT) technology, applications of battery powered machine vision based IoT devices is rapidly growing. While numerous research works are being conducted to develop low power hardware solutions for IoT devices, image capture and image processing remain high power demanding processes leading to a short battery life. However, the power consumption of the machine vision based IoT devices can be minimized by the careful optimization of the hardware components that are used is these devices. In this article, we present a review of low power machine vision hardware components for the IoT applications. A guide to selecting the optimum processors and image sensors for a given battery powered machine vision based IoT device is presented. Next, the factors that must be considered when selecting processors and image sensors for a given IoT application are discussed, and selection criteria for the processors and image sensors are established. Then, the current commercially available hardware components are reviewed in accordance with the established selection criteria. Finally, the research trends in the field of battery powered machine vision based IoT devices are discussed, and the potential future research directions in the field are presented.