CMOS Image Sensor Dedicated to Speed Determination of Fast Moving Luminous Objects

International audience ; We present a CMOS image sensor for speed determination of fast moving luminous objects. Our circuit furnishes a 16-gray level image that contains both spatial and temporal information on the fast moving object under observation. The spatial information is given by the coordinates of the illuminated pixels and the temporal information is coded in the gray level of the pixels. By applying simple image processing algorithms to the image, the trajectory, direction of motion and speed of the moving object can be determined. The circuit is designed and fabricated in standard CMOS 0.6 μm process from Austria MicroSystems (AMS). The core of the circuit is an array of 64 × 64 pixels based on an original Digital Pixel Sensor (DPS) architecture. Each pixel is composed of a photodiode as the light sensing element, a comparator, a pulse generator and a 4-bit static memory for storing the gray value of the pixel. The working principle of the circuit, its design and some quantitative experimental results are presented in the paper.