Abstract-An image sensor with focal plane based hardware acceleration of video compression is presented. The 90×90 pixel CMOS image sensor provides in-pixel processing of intensity changes, serving as an analog memory and processor for temporal image difference computation. Surveillance quality videos of up to a 48:1 compression ratio via a temporally compensated DCT based compression algorithm is attained with just an 18.5 MHz micro-controller. Power consumption is 225mW during full operation and 6mW during a sleep mode that continuously monitors for change events to trigger encoding.