A 100μW 64x128-Pixel Contrast-Based Asynchronous Binary Vision Sensor for Wireless Sensor Networks

A 641times128-pixel vision sensor, whose pixels estimate and perform a 1b quantization on the local contrast with a low energy budget is presented in this paper. The pixel-embedded time-adaptive visual processing is based on a charge-transfer mechanism, featuring no DC power consumption. The asynchronous readout process takes 147 mus and dispatches the column address of each asserted pixel, significantly reducing the chip activity at the interface. For typical indoor visual contrast estimation, involving 5% of the total number of pixels, the sensor exhibits a power consumption of 100 muW at 3.3V and 50 frames/s.