Nihar Athreyas¹, Zhiguo Lai², Jai Gupta² and Dev Gupta^{2 1}University of Massachusetts, USA and ²Newlans Inc., USA

Imaging and Image sensors is a field that is continuously evolving. There are new products coming into the market every day. Some of these have very severe Size, Weight and Power constraints whereas other devices have to handle very high computational loads. Some require both these conditions to be met simultaneously. Current imaging architectures and digital image processing solutions will not be able to meet these ever increasing demands. There is a need to develop novel imaging architectures and image processing solutions to address these requirements. In this work we propose analog signal processing as a solution to this problem. The analog processor is not suggested as a replacement to a digital processor but it will be used as an augmentation device which works in parallel with the digital processor, making the system faster and more efficient. In order to show the merits of analog processing the highly computational Normalized Cross Correlation algorithm is implemented. We propose two novel modifications to the algorithm and a new imaging architecture which, significantly reduces the computation time.

Analog Signal Processing, Parallel Architecture, Image Alignment, Stereo Correspondence & Normalized Cross Correlation.