CMOS Image Sensor for AIoT and Computer Vision Applications

Date
01/22/2020

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Himax Imaging, Inc., announced the commercial availability for HM0360, an industry-first ultra-low power and low latency Back-Illuminated CMOS Image Sensor solution with autonomous modes of operations for always on, intelligent visual sensing applications such as human presence detection and tracking, gaze detection, behavioral analysis, and pose estimation for growing markets like smart home, smart building, healthcare, smartphone and AR/VR devices. Himax is currently working with leading AI framework provider such as Google and industry partners to develop reference design that can enable low power hardware and platform options to reduce time to market for intelligent edge vision solutions.

“Many devices today, such as smartphones, integrate very low power, always on sensing like acoustic, motion and ambient light level to enhance user experience and save power. However, one of the key challenges to 2-dimensional image sensing for computer vision is the high power consumption and data bandwidth of the sensor and processing,” said Amit Mittra, CTO of Himax Imaging. “The HM0360 addresses this opportunity by delivering a very low power image sensor that achieves excellent image quality with high signal-to-noise ratio and dynamic range, which allows algorithms to operate under challenging lighting conditions, from bright sunlight to moonlight. The VGA resolution can double the range of detection over Himax’s HM01B0 QVGA sensor, especially to support greater than 90-degree wide field of view lens. Additionally, the HM0360 introduces several new features to reduce camera latency, system overhead and power consumption.”

Himax’s new HM0360 sensor builds on the success of HM01B0 that had led the market in enabling devices with new visual context awareness, such as Smart TV with human presence detection, to enhance user experience and increase energy efficiency. Unique features of HM0360 include:

  • Several autonomous modes of operation
  • Pre-metering function to ensure exposure quality for every event frame
  • Short sensor initialization time
  • Extremely low <2ms wake up time
  • Fast context switching and frame configuration update
  • Multi-camera synchronization
  • 150 parallel addressable regions of interests
  • Event sensing modes with programmable interrupts to allow the host processor to be placed in low power sleep until notified by the sensor
  • Operating up to VGA resolution of 60 frames per second sensor at 14.5mW and consumes less than 500µW using binning mode readout at 3FPS
  • Supporting multiple power supply configurations with minimal passive components to enable a highly compact camera module design for next generation smart camera devices.

http://www.himax.com.tw

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