tinyML Summit 2021 Song Chen Tutorial: Image sensors for low power applications

tinyML Summit 2021 https://www.tinyml.org/event/summit-2021

Song Chen – Facebook
Tutorial: Image sensors for low power applications

Image sensors are the front end of many computer-vision based input modalities. These human-machine input modalities usually need to run on a mobile platform which has stringent power requirement. This tutorial will cover both low power image sensor design from a designer’s perspective and some useful practices to save sensor power from a user’s perspective especially in ML applications. We will start by laying out basics including the operation principle of pixels, readout chain and other common blocks in an image sensor. Then, the trade-off between power consumption and general sensor performance will be discussed. Following the discussion, the effectiveness of power reduction techniques like subsampling, low frame rate, etc. and the impact on following ML processing stages will be evaluated with examples. Finally, an ultra-low power global-shutter digital pixel sensor developed at Facebook Reality Labs Research will be introduced.

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