SCAMP Vision Sensor

The SCAMP vision sensor integrates a massively parallel SIMD processor array into the pixels of the image sensor device. It does not output raw images, like a conventional camera, but rather the results of on-sensor computations, for instance a feature map, optic flow map and/or address-events describing locations of pixels of interest. As costly early vision computations are done entirely on-sensor, high speed and low-power consumption of the entire camera system are feasible, enabling new embedded vision applications.  The device is fully programmable, to execute a variety of computer vision algorithms, addressing application demands in areas such as robotics, VR, automotive, toys, inspection, monitoring,  etc. 

In a conventional machine vision system, images are acquired, digitised, and transmitted off camera, frame after frame. The processor system then needs to keep up with the resulting pixel avalanche, with large amount of data continually exchanged between the sensor, processors and the memory to implement required vision algorithms. This is inefficient. Our approach, inspired by the biology, is based on moving the computation from the processor system to the sensor itself. Essentially, we embed a parallel processor array into the image sensor. The approach has a number of advantages:

• Pixel data is processed right next to where is acquired, eliminating inefficient communication bottlenecks between the sensor and the processor.

• Only the meaningful data, i.e. some pre-processed information extracted from the image frames, relevant to the application, is transmitted downstream for further processing (using e.g. a low power microcontroller, rather than a GPU-class processing hardware) 

• Parallelism of the vision tasks is well exploited. Very large number of relatively simple processors, organised as a pixel-parallel SIMD processor array, provide large compute power and high efficiency in terms of processing power per watt.

• Massively parallel system, with topology matching well the image data structure (2D arrays), is efficient and easy to program.

• Our unique processor circuit design, including analog and digital operations, produces extremely compact and efficient, yet fully software-programmable solution. 

On these pages, you can find out more about SCAMP technology, and see the demonstrations of various algorithms implemented on the device.