A New High Speed CMOS Camera for Real-Time Tracking Applications

Abstract — There are many potential applications for very highspeed vision sensors in robotics. Maybe tracking is the most obvious one. The main idea of this paper is to combine existing standard technology (CMOS imaging sensors, FPGA “glue logic”, and USB 2.0 interface) to use direct pixel access capabilities for real-time tracking. We designed and built such a prototype camera system, including FPGA programmed functionality for Fixed Pattern Noise (FPN) calibration, subsampling and direct subwindow access. The performance of this new camera is on one hand limited by the maximum pixel clock of the sensor, on the other hand by the USB 2.0 microframe timing and bandwith constraints. We achieve “frame rates ” of up to 2.5 kHz for small subwindows which can be randomly and individually addressed for each update cycle. Besides all given technical details and specifications of the system, we show a demonstration application of a high-speed blob tracking system which verifies the usability of our new camera for highly demanding tracking applications