Jae-Sung KONG, Sung-Ho SUH¹, Sang-Heon KIM, Jang-Kyoo SHIN^* and Minho LEE

Department of Electronics, Kyungpook National University, 1370 Sankyuk-dong, Buk-ku, Daegu 702-701, Korea
¹Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd., Yongin-city, Gyeonggi-Do, 449-711, Korea

(Received January 10, 2006; Accepted July 11, 2006)

In this paper, a vision chip for edge detection based on the structure of biological retina is introduced. The key advantage of retinal structure is speed of operation. However, bio-inspired vision chips have suffered from low resolution which is caused by their complex circuit structure. To sufficiently improve the resolution for real application, the circuits for analog processing were separated from circuits for image capturing. In addition, we compensated the low speed problem of operation which is caused by bottleneck of data transfer between photo-sensors and analog processing circuit by adding a reset decoder. The vision chip was fabricated using 0.35 μm 2-poly 4-metal complementary metal–oxide–semiconductor technology. Using the vision chip, we could obtain a contrast-enhanced image without any other cost-increase for fabrication of chips. Then, the edge image was easily achieved by thresholding the previous contrast-enhanced image.

Key words: vision chip, edge detection, resolution, CMOS image sensor

^*E-mail address: jkshin@ee.knu.ac.kr