A 240 × 180 130 dB 3 µs Latency Global Shutter Spatiotemporal Vision Sensor

Abstract

Event-based dynamic vision sensors (DVSs) asynchronously report log intensity changes. Their high dynamic range, sub-ms latency and sparse output make them useful in applications such as robotics and real-time tracking. However they discard absolute intensity information which is useful for object recognition and classification. This paper presents a dynamic and active pixel vision sensor (DAVIS) which addresses this deficiency by outputting asynchronous DVS events and synchronous global shutter frames concurrently. The active pixel sensor (APS) circuits and the DVS circuits within a pixel share a single photodiode. Measurements from a 240×180 sensor array of 18.5 μm 2 pixels fabricated in a 0.18 μm 6M1P CMOS image sensor (CIS) technology show a dynamic range of 130 dB with 11% contrast detection threshold, minimum 3 μs latency, and 3.5% contrast matching for the DVS pathway; and a 51 dB dynamic range with 0.5% FPN for the APS readout.