Ultra-low-power image signal processor for smart camera applications

Among thriving cyber physical systems, smart camera applications require to run both image sensors and image signal processors (ISPs) to capture images whenever necessary. Owing to the nature of such applications (i.e. constantly capturing images and analysing the images to detect any event of interest), the image sensor and ISP become the two most energy consuming components in smart camera applications. It is started with the intuition that the perceptive quality of images is not strongly correlated with the accuracy of object detection algorithms and a technique that requires only minor modifications to the baseline ISP is proposed but notably reduces the ISP energy consumption in object detection mode for smart camera applications. It is demonstrated that the ISP reduces energy consumption by 33% compared with the baseline ISP energy while degrading face detection accuracy by only 3%.