I once saw a presentation by Chip Elliott about a project to make video sensors ultra low power. They were redesigning the sensors from the ground up to reduce

I once saw a presentation by Chip Elliott about a project to make video sensors ultra low power. They were redesigning the sensors from the ground up to reduce power usage in order to enable cameras to be used as very low power sensing devices. They were thinking that instead of processing a lot of captured video computation could be embedded in the sensor to make sensors that could output sophisticated signals from a dedicated chip. For example a chip that detects people or faces, a circle detecting chip, or a video flow analysis chip. All that is available in software these days, but the idea was to build it into hardware that requires almost no power. The intent was to take the huge potential of cameras as sensors and remove the high costs of power and computation as a restraint on their use, making them as cheap to use as a temperature sensor, possibly revolutionizing sensing and greatly increasing the sophistication of sensors. Combining that work with event-based cameras seems like a natural fit. Never heard any more about the project, I wonder if they've had any success. Tried a Google Scholar search but didn't find anything published.