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Abbas El Gamal

Computational Image Sensors

The need for low cost, low power mobile imaging has fueled the development of CMOS image sensors over the past decade. In addition to closing the imaging performance gap with CCDs, the primary focus of this development has been on reducing pixel size to increase spatial resolution. While integrated circuit feature size scaling allows for continued pixel scaling, the practical limits of optics as well as SNR and dynamic range considerations make such scaling increasingly problematic. Are we approaching the end of image sensor development?

I will argue that while the end of conventional image sensor development may be indeed approaching, there is a growing need to develop new types of "computational" CMOS image sensors to address existing and emerging applications.

I will first give a brief tutorial on image sensors and discuss the limits of pixel scaling in conventional image sensors. I will then give examples of computational image sensors that we developed at Stanford and their applications. In particular, I will show that there are important benefits to scaling pixel size below the optics spot size. Reaping these benefits, however, requires a basic change in the way images are captured.

Biography

Abbas El Gamal received his B.Sc. degree in Electrical Engineering from Cairo University in 1972, the M.S. in Statistics and the PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford in 1977 and 1978, respectively. From 1978 to 1980 he was an Assistant Professor of Electrical Engineering at USC . He has been on the faculty of the Department of Electrical Engineering at Stanford since 1981. He was on leave from Stanford from 1984 to 1988 first as Director of LSI Logic Research Lab, then as cofounder and Chief Scientist of Actel corporation. In 1990 he cofounded Silicon Architects, which is currently part of Synopsys. His research has spanned several areas including digital imaging, network information theory, and integrated circuit design. He has authored or coauthored 150 papers and 25 patents in these areas. He has served on the board of directors and advisory boards of several IC and EDA companies. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.

Dennis M. Healy, Jr.

Purposeful Imaging: Case of Integrated Sensing and Processing

Biography

Dennis M. Healy, Jr. received the B.S. degrees in Physics and mathematics and the Ph.D. degree in Mathematics from the University of California at San Diego (UCSD), La Jolla, in 1980 and 1986, respectively. He is a Professor of mathematics at the University of Maryland, College Park, as well as Program Manager for the Microsystems Technology Office at DARPA. Previously, he served as program manager for DARPA's Applied and Computational Mathematics Program in the Defense Sciences Office and as Associate Professor at Dartmouth College with joint appointments in the Departments of Mathematics and Computer Science. His research concerns applied computational mathematics in real-world settings including medical imaging, optical fiber communications, design and control of integrated sensor/processor systems, control of quantum systems, statistical pattern recognition, and fast non-Abelian algorithms for data analysis.

Dan Nilsson

Animal eyes: From the simple to the sophisticated

Biography

Dan Nilsson holds the chair of Zoology at the university of Lund (Sweden). He received his PhD from Lund University in 1983, and moved to a postdoctoral position at The Australian National University in Canberra, Australia 1983-1984. He returned to the University of Lund in 1984 to set up his own group and develop ophthalmoscopic techniques for the study of optics in small eyes. Work on crustacean and insect compound eyes soon led to discoveries of previously unknown imaging principles in animal eyes. He also took a more general interest in eye evolution and developed algorithms demonstrating that eyes can evolve in a surprisingly short time. In 1995 he was offered the chair in Zoology at Lund University, and he is now heading the Lund Vision Group and the Centre for Animal and Machine Vision at Lund University. His current research concerns vision in many different animal groups, with an emphasis on vision in primitive invertebrate animals, and questions on the evolutionary origin of vision.