An Analog VLSI Chip for Thin-Plate Surface Interpolation
John G. Harris · CaltechAUTHORS (California Institute of Technology) · 1988
Reconstructing a surface from sparse sensory data is a well-known problem in computer vision. This paper describes an experimental analog VLSI chip for smooth surface interpolation from sparse depth data. An eight-node ID network was designed in 3J.lm CMOS and successfully tested. The network minimizes a second-order or "thinplate" energy of the surface. The circuit directly implements the coupled depth/slope model of surface reconstruction (Harris, 1987). In addition, this chip can provide Gaussian-like smoothing of images.