A CMOS Image Sensor and an AI Accelerator for Realizing Edge-Computing-Based Surveillance Camera Systems

This paper presents a CMOS image sensor and an AI accelerator to realize surveillance camera systems based on edge computing. For CMOS image sensors to be used for surveillance, it is desirable that they are highly sensitive even in low illuminance. We propose a new timing shift ADC used in CMOS image sensors for improving high sensitivity performance. Our proposed ADC improves non-linearity characteristics under low illuminance by 63%. Achieving power-efficient edge computing is a challenge for the systems to be used widely in the surveillance camera market. We demonstrate that our proposed AI accelerator performs inference processing for object recognition with 1 TOPS/W. Keywords: CMOS image sensor, surveillance camera system, low light imaging, AI accelerator, edge computing