A 27mW Reconfigurable Marker-less Logarithmic Camera Pose Estimation Engine for Mobile Augmented Reality Processor

A marker-less Camera Pose Estimation Engine (CPEE) with reconfigurable logarithmic processor is proposed for the view angle estimation in the low-power mobile Augmented Reality (AR) applications. The proposed CPEE is required to overcome 150x huge gap in computational cost for marker-less pose estimation including floating-point operations resulting in the bottlenecks in mobile platforms. Speculative Execution (SE) and Reconfigurable Data-arrangement Layer (RDL) are proposed to reduce the computing time of CPEE by 17% and 27%, respectively. For low-power implementation of floating-point units, Logarithmic Processing Element (LPE) is used to reduce overall power consumption by 18% with maximum conversion error under 0.49%. The proposed markerless CPEE is fabricated in 65nm Logic CMOS technology, and successfully realizes real-time marker-less camera pose estimation with only 27mW power consumption.