The Taub Faculty of Computer Science Events and Talks

At least in the near term, micro-scale platforms like micro air vehicles and micro sensor nodes are unlikely to have power, volume, or mass budgets to support conventional imaging and post-capture processing for visual tasks like detection and tracking. These budgets are severe enough that even common computations, such as large matrix manipulations and convolutions, are difficult or impossible. To help overcome this, we are considering sensor designs that allow some components of scene analysis to happen optically, before light strikes the sensor. I will present and analyze one class of designs in this talk. These sensors reduce power requirements through template-based optical convolution, and they enable a wide field-of-view within a small form. I will describe the trade-offs between field-of-view, volume, and mass in these sensors, and I will describe our initial efforts toward choosing effective templates. I will also show examples of milli-scale prototypes for simple computer vision tasks such as locating edges, tracking targets, and detecting faces.