Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 16 (NIPS 2003)
Masakazu Yagi, Hideo Yamasaki, Tadashi Shibata
A mixed-signal image filtering VLSI has been developed aiming at real-time generation of edge-based image vectors for robust image recognition. A four-stage asynchronous median detection architec- ture based on analog digital mixed-signal circuits has been intro- duced to determine the threshold value of edge detection, the key processing parameter in vector generation. As a result, a fully seamless pipeline processing from threshold detection to edge fea- ture map generation has been established. A prototype chip was designed in a 0.35-µm double-polysilicon three-metal-layer CMOS technology and the concept was verified by the fabricated chip. The chip generates a 64-dimension feature vector from a 64x64-pixel gray scale image every 80µsec. This is about 104 times faster than the software computation, making a real-time image recognition system feasible.