Biomimetic frame-free HDR camera with event-driven PWM image/video sensor and full-custom address-event processor

This paper presents a high DR, high temporal resolution, frame-free image/video camera that encodes and processes visual information in asynchronous spikes. The event-driven optical sensor features 9.3-bit grayscale imaging at up to 143dB DR and <0.25% FPN with hardware-based lossless video compression and time-domain correlated double sampling. The main components of the camera — the asynchronous, time-based image sensor (ATIS) and a general purpose Address-Event processor (GAEP) with 20-Bit 10ns-resolution sensor data interface — have been specifically designed with the goal to implementing a biomimetic, asynchronous, frame-free approach to vision. The presented system optimally combines the advantages of time-based (PWM) imaging, bio-inspired temporal contrast dynamic vision and event-based (AER) information encoding and data communication, and achieves exceptional performance in terms of dynamic range, FPN, temporal resolution, gray-level resolution and data compression.