Hardware Environment for a Retinal CCD Visual Sensor

Fernando Pardo and Enrico Martinuzzi

Abstract

A CCD retinal sensor has been developed recently. The main property of this device is to perform the log-polar transform in real time due to its specific pixel disposition.

This device differs in structure respect to the matrix based CCD sensors used in normal cameras. This special structure requires a specific hardware to deal with the generated signals and the control of the device.

In this article we describe the work environment of this sensor. There are basically three parts, that has been developed for this special chip. The first one is the sensor itself, the second one is the module to generate the different signal that the sensor needs to work properly. The last one is a special frame grabber that stores the images to be processed in a host computer.