A closed-loop all-electronic pixel-wise adaptive imaging system for high dynamic range video

TL;DR

This paper presents a CMOS imaging system with pixel-wise adaptive exposure control that captures high dynamic range videos in real-time, improving computer vision tasks under complex lighting and motion conditions.

Contribution

The work introduces a novel closed-loop, all-electronic pixel-wise adaptive imaging system integrated on a standard CMOS sensor for HDR video capture.

Findings

Enhanced HDR video quality under complex lighting conditions

Improved performance in segmentation, motion estimation, and object recognition

Reduced system size and power consumption

Abstract

We demonstrated a CMOS imaging system that adapts each pixel's exposure and sampling rate to capture high dynamic range (HDR) videos. The system consist of a custom designed image sensor with pixel-wise exposure configurability and a real-time pixel exposure controller. These parts operate in a closed-loop to sample, detect and optimize each pixel's exposure and sampling rate to minimize local region's underexposure, overexposure and motion blurring. Exposure control is implemented using all-integrated electronics without external optical modulation. This reduces overall system size and power consumption. The image sensor is implemented using a standard 130nm CMOS process while the exposure controller is implemented on a computer. We performed experiments under complex lighting and motion condition to test performance of the system, and demonstrate the benefit of pixel-wise adaptive imaging on the performance of computer vision tasks such as segmentation, motion estimation and object recognition.