Retinomorphic Vision Systems I: Pixel Design

Abstract

I present and analyze test results from circuits that perform all four major operations performed by biological retinae using neurobiological principles: (1) continuous sensing for detection, (2) local automatic gain control for amplification, (3) spatiotemporal bandpass filtering for preprocessing, and (4) adaptive sampling for quantization. In the retinomorphic system that I describe, all these operations are performed at the pixel level, to eliminate redundancy, to reduce power dissipation, and to make efficient use of the capacity of the output channel.