LOW-POWER ALWAYS-ON FACE DETECTION, TRACKING, RECOGNITION AND/OR ANALYSIS USING EVENTS-BASED VISION SENSOR

摘要

Techniques disclosed herein utilize a vision sensor that integrates a special-purpose camera with dedicated computer vision (CV) computation hardware and a dedicated low-power microprocessor for the purposes of detecting, tracking, recognizing, and/or analyzing subjects, objects, and scenes in the view of the camera. The vision sensor processes the information retrieved from the camera using the included low-power microprocessor and sends “events” (or indications that one or more reference occurrences have occurred, and, possibly, associated data) for the main processor only when needed or as defined and configured by the application. This allows the general-purpose microprocessor (which is typically relatively high-speed and high-power to support a variety of applications) to stay in a low-power (e.g., sleep mode) most of the time as conventional, while becoming active only when events are received from the vision sensor.

主权项

1. A smart sensor for sensing dynamic scene-based occurrences, the smart sensor comprising:
dedicated computer vision (CV) computation hardware configured to receive sensor data from a sensor array comprising more than one sensor pixel and capable of computing one or more CV features using readings from neighboring sensor pixels of the sensor array; and a first processing unit communicatively coupled with the dedicated CV computation hardware and configured to process signals resulting from operations based on the one or more computed CV features; wherein the smart sensor is configured to generate an event to be received by a second processing unit in response to the processing of the signals resulting from the operations based on the one or more computed CV features by the first processing unit, the event indicating a reference occurrence for the second processing unit.