A Low-power Data Acquisition System for Image Contrast Detection

This paper deals with a data acquisition system based on a low-power digital sensor for image contrast detection. This system is suitable for geometric pattern recognition as well as for event monitoring. Possible applications are: surveillance, people access monitoring, and road lines recognition in car-like vehicles. The adopted imager was developed by the Fondazione Bruno Kessler (FBK), Trento, Italy, and it is particularly useful whenever the available energy budget and the channel communication bandwidth are too limited to use common video cameras. Since neither the standard testing procedures for Analog-to-Digital Converters (ADCs) nor those for cameras are suitable to assess the performance of the proposed system, one possible ad-hoc testing methodology is also described and some experimental results are reported.