A Memory-Efficient Architecture of Full HD Around View Monitor Systems

The around view monitor (AVM) is one of the representative features of smart vision systems adopted in various application areas, e.g., advanced driver assistance systems. The design of AVM systems with full high-definition (HD)-level resolution presents significant technical challenges. In particular, a high-memory performance is required to process full HD images obtained from multiple cameras. Specifically, a full HD AVM system requires a high-memory bandwidth (six times higher than D1 image-based systems) and is characterized by a significant amount of single writes, which degrades the effective performance of modern DRAM. To address these problems, two methods are proposed in this paper. The first method reduces the required memory bandwidth by storing in the memory only the input pixel data that will be used in the final processing step, and the second improves the single-write performance of a DRAM subsystem by DRAM-aware data mapping. The effectiveness of the proposed methods is proved by designing an AVM system incorporating field-programmable gate arrays and DDR2-200 SDRAMs. The proposed methods reduce the memory bandwidth requirement by 51%, allowing a full HD AVM system to run at over 24 frames per second.X1131sciescopu

Imaging Sensors and Applications

In past decades, various sensor technologies have been used in all areas of our lives, thus improving our quality of life. In particular, imaging sensors have been widely applied in the development of various imaging approaches such as optical imaging, ultrasound imaging, X-ray imaging, and nuclear imaging, and contributed to achieve high sensitivity, miniaturization, and real-time imaging. These advanced image sensing technologies play an important role not only in the medical field but also in the industrial field. This Special Issue covers broad topics on imaging sensors and applications. The scope range of imaging sensors can be extended to novel imaging sensors and diverse imaging systems, including hardware and software advancements. Additionally, biomedical and nondestructive sensing applications are welcome