A keypoint-level parallel pipelined object recognition processor with gaze activation image sensor for mobile smart glasses system

In this paper, a low-power real-time gaze-activated object recognition processor is proposed for a battery-powered smart glasses system. For high energy efficiency, we propose keypoint-level pipelined architecture to increase the hardware utilziation which results in significant power reduction of the real-time recognition processor. In addition, low-power gaze-activation image sensor with mixed-mode architecture is proposed for the glass user´s gaze estimation. Therefore, only the small image region where the glasses user is seeing needs to be processed by the recognition processor leading to further power reduction. As a result, the proposed object recognition processor shows 30fps real-time performance only with 75mW power consumption, which is 3.5x and 4.4x smaller power than the state-of-the-art works.