Humans have two distinct vision systems: foveal and peripheral vision. Foveal vision is sharp and detailed, while peripheral vision lacks fidelity. The difference in characteristics of the two systems enable recently popular foveated rendering systems, which seek to increase rendering performance by lowering image quality in the periphery. We present a set of perceptually-based methods for improving foveated rendering running on a prototype virtual reality headset with an integrated eye tracker.

Superpixel generation is a common preprocessing step in vision processing aimed at dividing an image into non-overlapping regions. Simple Linear Iterative Clustering (SLIC) is a commonly used superpixel algorithm that offers a good balance between performance and accuracy. However, the algorithm’s high computational and memory bandwidth requirements result in performance and energy efficiency that do not meet the requirements of realtime embedded applications. In this work, we explore the design of an energy-efficient superpixel accelerator for real-time computer vision applications.

Power supply noise can significantly degrade circuit performance in modern high-performance SoCs. Adaptive clocking schemes have been proposed recently that can tolerate power supply noise by adjusting the clock frequency in response to fast-changing voltage variations. In this paper, we model and quantify power supply noise tolerance with a fine-grained globally asynchronous locally synchronous (GALS) design style together with an adaptive clocking scheme.

Many of the challenges of modern SoC design can be mitigated or eliminated with globally asynchronous, locally synchronous (GALS) design techniques. Partitioning a design into many synchronous islands introduces myriad asynchronous boundary crossings which typically incur high latency. We have designed a pausible bisynchronous FIFO that achieves low inter- face latency with a pausible clocking scheme.

Driver distraction is a serious threat to automotive safety. The visual-manual interfaces in cars are a source of distraction for drivers. Automotive touch-less hand gesture-based user interfaces can help to reduce driver distraction and enhance safety and comfort. The choice of hand gestures in automotive interfaces is central to their success and widespread adoption. In this work we evaluate the recognition accuracy of 25 different gestures for state-of-the-art computer vision-based gesture recognition algorithms and for human observers.

High-frequency illumination effects, such as highly glossy highlights on curved surfaces, are challenging to render in a stable manner. Such features can be much smaller than the area of a pixel and carry a high amount of energy due to high reflectance.

Many light transport related techniques require an analysis of the blur width of light scattering at a path vertex, for instance a Beck-mann roughness.

We describe a work-efficient, communication-avoiding, single-pass method for the parallel computation of prefix scan. When consuming input from memory, our algorithm requires only ~2n data movement: n inputs are read, n outputs are written. Our method embodies a decoupled look-back strategy that performs redundant work to dissociate local computation from the latencies of global prefix propagation. Implemented by the CUB library of parallel primitives for GPU architectures, the performance throughput of our parallel prefix scan approaches that of copy operations.

High-dynamic-range (HDR) images can be created with standard camera hardware by capturing and combining multiple pictures, each sampling a different segment of the irradiance distribution of a scene. This seemingly straightforward process involves several important steps, which will be the focus of this chapter. We start by examining the problem of selecting the set of exposures that properly measures the full dynamic range of a particular scene, a process known as metering for HDR.

Hardened flip-flops and latches are designed to be resilient to soft errors, maintaining high system reliability in the presence of energetic radiation. The wealth of different hardened designs (with varying protection levels) and the probabilistic nature of reliability complicates the choice of which hardened storage element to substitute where. This paper develops an analytical model for hardened latch and flip-flop design space exploration. It is shown that the best hardened design depends strongly on the target protection level and the chip that is being protected.