A Wide Dynamic Range CMOS Stereo Camera

Novel automotive applications, like automatic car park systems, time-to-crash sensors or autonomous driving systems require an accurate measurement of the environment around the vehicle. Distances to other vehicles and objects have to be known precisely. Stereo vision systems can be used to solve these problems. But high requirements are posted to the stereo camera as well as to the image processing unit. The image sensor has to deal with large variations in operation conditions, like illumination and temperature. The image processing unit needs a lot of computing power: a lot of correlation calculations are necessary to solve the two-dimensional matching problem between both images.