Designing Vision Systems That See Better

This chapter introduces computational sensing and imaging-a branch of computer vision that deals with embedded processing for capturing higher quality imagery, to the embedded vision developer. In this research domain, issues such as exposure, motion blur, and dynamic range are addressed by fundamentally changing how light is sensed, captured, and made available for downstream semantic processing. Some important applications enabled are in digital photography and situational awareness. We present several design examples on these camera platforms where modifications of the image-capture process result in significant improvements in image quality, allowing downstream vision analysis to perform better. Motivated by example applications, we then describe the basic architecture of an embedded vision system that dynamically tunes and adapts to the task at hand.