HDR vision sensor with neuro-memristive skin detection for edge computing

Human skin classification is an essential task for several machine vision applications such as human-machine interfaces, people/object tracking, and classification. In this paper, we describe a hybrid CMOS/memristor vision sensor architecture embedding skin detection over a wide dynamic range. In-sensor RGB to r g-chromaticity color-space conversion is executed on-the-fly through a pixel-level automatic exposure time control. Each pixel of the array delivers two pre-filtered analog signals, the r and g values, suitable for being efficiently classified as skin or non-skin through an analog memristive neural network (NN), without the need for any further signal processing. Moreover, we study the NN performance and theorize how it should be added in the hardware. The skin classifier is organized in an array of column-level memristor-based NN to exploit the nano-scale device characteristics and non-volatile analog memory capabilities, making the proposed sensor architecture highly flexible, customizable for various use-case scenarios, and low-power. The output is a skin bitmap that is robust against variations of the illuminant color and intensity.