WDR Sensor with Binary Image Feature

IET Electronics Letters publishes a paper "CMOS image sensor for wide dynamic range feature extraction in machine vision" by Hyeon‐June Kim from Kangwon National University, Korea.

"The proposed pixel structure has two operating modes, the normal and WDR modes. In the normal operating mode, the proposed CIS captures a normal image with high sensitivity. In addition, as a unique function, a bi‐level image is obtained for real‐time FE even if a pixel is saturated in strong illumination conditions. Thus, compared to typical CISs for machine vison, the proposed CIS can reveal object features that are blocked by light in real time. In the WDR operating mode, the proposed CIS produces a WDR image with its corresponding bi‐level image. A prototype CIS was fabricated using a standard 0.35‐μm 2P4M CMOS process with a 320 × 240 format (QVGA) with 10‐μm pitch pixels. At 60 fps, the measured power consumption was 5.98 mW at 3.3 V for pixel readout and 2.8 V for readout circuitry. The dynamic range of 73.1 dB was achieved in the WDR operating mode."