High performance IoT endpoints

So far, we have examined simple sensors that simply return information in a binary or analog form that must be sampled. There are, however, IoT devices and sensors that have substantial processing power and performance for the tasks they undertake. Smart sensors include devices such as video cameras and vision systems. Smart sensors can include substantial amounts of processing capacity in the form of high-end processors, digital signal processors, FPGAs, and custom ASICs. In this section, we will explore the details of one form of smart sensor: a vision system.

Vision systems

In contrast with the simple sensors explored earlier, vision systems are much more complex, which results in substantial hardware, optics, and imaging silicon. Vision systems start with a lens that observes a scene. A lens provides focus, but also provides more light saturation to the sensing element. In modern vision systems, one of two types of sensing elements is...