A Computer Vision System on a Chip: a case study from the automotive domain

The automotive market puts strict and often conflicting requirements on computer vision systems. On the one hand the algorithms require considerable computing power to work reliably in real-time and under a wide range of lighting conditions. On the other hand, the cost must be kept low, the package size must be small and the power consumption must be low. In addition, automotive qualified parts must be used both to withstand the harsh operating environment and to guarantee long product life. To meet all these conflicting requirements Mobileye developed the EyeQ, a complete ’system on a chip’ (SoC) which has the computing power to support a variety of applications such as lane, vehicle and pedestrian detection. This paper describes the process of designing an ASIC to support a family of vision algorithms.