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.
@article{arxiv.1906.10045,
title = {A closed-loop all-electronic pixel-wise adaptive imaging system for high dynamic range video},
author = {Jie and Zhang and Jonathan P. Newman and Xiao Wang and Chetan Singh Thakur and John Rattray and Ralph Etienne-Cummings and Matthew A. Wilson},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1906.10045},
year = {2019}
}