NSF Award
0339971
0339971<br/><br/>This Small Business Innovation Research Phase I project proposes to develop an adaptive <br/>CMOS image sensor that estimates and largely eliminates illumination variations in sensed <br/>optical images thus reporting electronic images that are indicative of the reflectance of the <br/>viewed scene. Most present and future vision applications including automotive, biometric, <br/>security, and mobile computing applications operate in unconstrained environments and have to <br/>cope with unknown and widely varying illumination conditions. The proposed research has a potential to broadly impact computer vision performance and reliability. The core innovation is in a signal processing technique for estimating the illumination field from sensed images. The technique efficiently implements as a dense on-chip massively parallel analog processor distributed among the photodetectors to produce a reflectance sensitive image sensor.<br/><br/>Image sensors are rapidly finding their way into cars, cell-phones, personal digital <br/>assistants, medical and diagnostic equipment, automated drug discovery, cutting edge security, <br/>surveillance and biometric systems. To fully realize the potential of electronic imaging in <br/>society, the image sensors will need to adapt and provide useful images most of the time even <br/>under the harshest of illumination conditions. The proposed research will make this possible and <br/>make people.s lives safer, more productive and more enjoyable.
