Research Group: Smart Sensors

The Smart Sensory group aims to foster research, development, and industrial dissemination of knowledge related to the emerging field of sensors and associated microsystems. The activity is genuinely multidisciplinary, leveraging knowledge and expertise from fields such as mixed-signal integrated circuits, signal processing algorithms and their VLSI implementation.

Awarded Grants

1."A Self-powered CMOS Image Sensor with on-chip Motion Detection for Surveillance and Assisted-living Applications", PI, 2010-2013.

2."A new CMOS image sensor for satellite remote sensing application", PI, 2011-2014.

3."65nm CMOS Standard-Cell Library for Harsh Environment", PI, 2011-2013.

4."Biomimetic Event-based Vision System for Assisted-living and Machine Vision Application", PI, 2009-2012.

5."A Floating-gate Based Sub-threshold, Low-power, Reconfigurable Neural Processor with Applications to Visual Attention, Recognition and Tracking", Co-PI, 2011-2014.

Projects Highlights

Part of the “Nano-satellite System Development” program. The scope of the program is to design and build an advanced nano-satellite "VELOX-I", which will be equipped with several innovations such as a new CMOS image sensor, a new camera mechanism design, a new integrated attitude determination sensor and control system, a separation mechanism and a quantum communication experimental payload etc. In particular, the CMOS image sensor will address a number of challenges such as space radiation, wide range of operating temperature as well as limited exposure time.

The chip integrates temporal difference motion detection together with cluster-based size and position calculation. Once the motion object is located, the sensor will switch to window mode and takes a zoomed image of the object-of-interest.

This is a low power temporal difference image sensor with wireless communication capability designed specifically for imaging sensor networks. The event-based image sensor features a 64x64 pixel array and can also report standard analog intensity images. An ultra-wide-band (UWB) radio channel allows to transmit digital temporal difference images wirelessly to a receiver with high rates and reduced power consumption. The sensor can wake up the radio when it detects a specific number of pixels intensity modulation, so that only significant frames are communicated. Power consumption is 0.9mW for the sensor and 15mW for radio transmission to distance of 4m with rates of 1.3Mbps and 160fps.
temporal difference image sensor designed in 2009	Experimental Setup	analog (top) and motion (bottom) sample images

This research aims at building a complete image parsing and interpretation system for applications include, but not limited to, artificial vision, interactive gaming, and monitoring of elderly people. For instance, the increasing ageing population leads to more investment in elderly care services and at the same time, shortage of skilled care-givers. To effectively assess response and assist those elderly patients in trouble becomes an important research topic in medical elderly care services. Our research target is to introduce and study highly-efficient biologically-plausible engine for objects categorization, and in particular human postures in realtime video sequences. We will study: 1) optimally encode data to remove undesired image information by designing smart feature extraction image sensor; 2) increase the efficiency of data-processing circuits by novel segmentation technique and efficient classifier to achieve robust recognition.

Collaborators
　

Eugenio Culurciello, Purdue University

Amine Bermak, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology

Farid Boussaid, the University of Western Australia

Chip Hong Chang, Nanyang Technological University

Low Kay Soon, Nanyang Technological University