A new approach of smart vision sensors

Today's digital image sensors are used as passive photon integrators and image processing is essentially performed by digital processors separated from the image sensing part. This approach imposes to the processing part to deal with already grabbed pictures with possible unadjusted exposition parameters. This paper presents a fast self-adaptable preprocessing architecture with fast feedbacks on the sensing level. These feedbacks are controlled by digital processing in order to modify the sensor parameters during exposure time. Exposition and processing parameters are tuned in real life to fit with applications requirement depending on scene parameters. Considering emerging integration technologies such as 3D stacking, this paper presents an innovative way of designing smart vision sensors, integrating feedback control and opening new approaches for machine vision architectures.