A 470mV 2.7mW feature extraction-accelerator for micro-autonomous vehicle navigation in 28nm CMOS

This paper proposes a power-efficient speeded-up robust features (SURF) extraction accelerator targeted primarily for micro air vehicles (MAVs) with autonomous navigation (Fig. 9.7.1). Typical object recognition SoCs [4-6] employ an application-specific algorithm to choose specific regions of interest (ROIs) to reduce computation by focusing on a small portion of the image. However, this approach is not feasible in applications where the whole image must be analyzed, such as visual navigation that requires the extraction of general features to determine location or movement. In addition, multicore architectures need to run at high clock frequencies to meet high peak performance requirements and the power consumption of inter-core communication becomes prohibitive. Since feature extraction algorithms require significant memory accesses across a large area, parallelization in a multicore system requires costly high-bandwidth memories for massive intermediate data.