CMOS APS With Integrated Centroid-Computation Circuits

An advanced complementary metal oxide/semiconductor (CMOS) active-pixel sensor (APS) incorporates integrated circuitry that computes the centroid of the image in a window selectable by the user. The development of this circuitry is significant in that it is necessary to compute centroids of images in diverse applications that include robotic vision, autonomous navigation, optical communications, and scientific imaging. Heretofore, it has been necessary to compute centroids by use of off-chip circuitry, at the cost of increased data latency, power consumption, and system size. This circuitry computes image centroids on-chip at a high speed and in analog domain, while consuming little additional power, and is compatible with high-performance CMOS APS circuitry.