A 27 mW Reconfigurable Marker-Less Logarithmic Camera Pose Estimation Engine for Mobile Augmented Reality Processor

A marker-less camera pose estimation engine (CPEE) with reconfigurable logarithmic SIMD processor is proposed for the view angle estimation used in mobile augmented reality (AR) applications. Compared to previous marker-based approach, marker-less camera pose estimation can overlay virtual images directly on natural world without the help of markers. However, they require 150× larger computing costs and large power consuming floating-point operations where such requirement severely restricts real-time operations and low-power implementations in mobile platform, respectively. To overcome the gap in computational costs between marker-based and marker-less method, speculative execution (SE) and reconfigurable data-arrangement layer (RDL) are proposed to reduce computing time by 17% and 27%, respectively. For low-power implementation of floating-point units, logarithmic processing element (LPE) is designed to reduce overall power consumption by 18%. The proposed marker-less CPEE is fabricated in 65 nm Logic CMOS technology, and successfully realizes real-time marker-less camera pose estimation with only 27 mW power consumption.