A Smart-Visio Microphone for Audio-Visual Speech Recognition “Vmike“

The practical implementation of audio-video coupled speech recognition systems is mainly limited by the hardware complexity to integrate two radically different information capturing devices with good temporal synchronisation. In this paper, we propose a solution based on a smart CMOS image sensor in order to simplify the hardware integration difficulties. By using on-chip image processing, this smart sensor can calculate in real time the X/Y projections of the captured image. This on-chip projection reduces considerably the volume of the output data. This data-volume reduction permits a transmission of the condensed visual information via the same audio channel by using a stereophonic input available on most of the standard computation devices such as PC, PDA and mobile phones. A prototype called VMIKE (Visio-Microphone) has been designed and realised by using standard 0.35um CMOS technology. A preliminary experiment gives encouraged results. Its efficiency will be further investigated in a large variety of applications such as biometrics, speech recognition in noisy environments, and vocal control for military or disabled persons, etc.

Image Sensor Matrix High Speed Simulation

This paper presents a new high speed simulation methodology to solve the long simulation time problem of CMOS image sensor matrix. Generally, for integrating the pixel matrix in SOC and simulating the system performance, designers try to model the pixel in various modeling languages such as VHDL-AMS, SystemC or Matlab. We introduce a new alternative method based on spice model in cadence design platform to achieve accuracy and reduce simulation time. The simulation results indicate that the pixel output voltage maximum error is at 0.7812% and time consumption reduces from 2.2 days to 13 minutes achieving about 240X speed-up for the 256x256 pixel matrix.