RoboRetina: An Illumination-Adaptive Camera for Security, Biometrics and Unmanned Systems

This project focuses on imaging sensors and systems, and on their ability to adapt to high and low dynamic range scenes thus providing useful imagery in many applications of importance to a war fighter. RoboRetina® is our imaging technology that mimics locally-adaptive properties of the human eye. It is primarily designed to enable new adaptive image sensors. The development efforts will be organized in two areas: 1)A RoboRetina embedded signal processing system for the processing and display of high dynamic range images, and 2) Adaptive CMOS image sensor for acquisition of high dynamic range scenes. The first area – the embedded signal processing system – is intended to demonstrate our technology “at work” as early as possible. It will meet the present and future needs in high dynamic range imaging applications such as in surveillance, monitoring, autonomous systems and other imaging applications of importance to the modern war fighter. The second area – the CMOS image sensor – is intended to explore new ideas for delivery of high dynamic range images (e.g., 14-20 bits) in a miniature pixel (<10um, including the detector). Although our efforts under this program will revolve around visible spectral band, the proposed work is directly extensible to address issues in the IR applications and markets.