High-Speed Industrial Vision Applications Using an Embedded Smart Sensor System

A compact, low-power line-sensor vision system has been developed for use in high-speed industrial machine vision applications. The system contains a 2×256 dual-line optical transient address-event sensor with autonomous, self-signaling pixels and pixel-level precision time-stamping, and an embedded DSP platform for real-time address-event processing. Initial pre-processing of the visual information at the pixel level results in a complete suppression of image data redundancy, resulting in drastically reduced processing power requirements at the embedded system level. The sensor system features sub-microsecond time resolution, outperforming traditional, frame-based linescan sensor systems by up to two orders of magnitude. The system features are beneficial for high-speed machine vision applications in the fields of industrial automation and automotive. In this paper, the system architecture and application results examples are presented.