Smart CMOS Image Sensors and Applications

Image sensors have recently attracted renewed interest for use in digital cameras, mobile phone cameras, handy camcoders, cameras in automobiles, and other devices. For these applications, CMOS image sensors are widely used because they feature on-chip integration of the signal processing circuitry. CMOS image sensors for such specific purposes are sometimes called smart CMOS image sensors,vision chips,computational image sensors, etc. Smart CMOS Image Sensors & Applications focuses on smart functions implemented in CMOS image sensors and their applications. Some sensors have already been commercialized, whereas some have only been proposed; the field of smart CMOS image sensors is active and generating new types of sensors. In this book I have endeavored to gather references related to smart CMOS image sensors and their applications; however, the field is so vast that it is likely that some topics are not described. Furthermore, the progress in the field is so rapid that some topics will develop as the book is being written. However, I believe the essentials of smart CMOS image sensors are sufficiently covered and that this book is therefore useful for graduate school students and engineers entering the field. This book is organized as follows. First, MOS imagers and smart CMOS image sensors are introduced. The second chapter then describes the fundamental elements of CMOS image sensors and details the relevant optoelectronic device physics. Typical CMOS image sensor structures, such as the active pixel sensor (APS), are introduced in this chapter. The subsequent chapters form the main part of the book, namely a description of smart imagers. Chapter 3 introduces several functions for smart CMOS image sensors. Using these functions, Chapter 4 describes smart imaging, such as wide dynamic range image sensing, target tracking, and three-dimensional range finding. In the final chapter, Chapter 5, several examples of applications of smart CMOS image sensors are describe