9,539 research outputs found
A bio-inspired image coder with temporal scalability
We present a novel bio-inspired and dynamic coding scheme for static images.
Our coder aims at reproducing the main steps of the visual stimulus processing
in the mammalian retina taking into account its time behavior. The main novelty
of this work is to show how to exploit the time behavior of the retina cells to
ensure, in a simple way, scalability and bit allocation. To do so, our main
source of inspiration will be the biologically plausible retina model called
Virtual Retina. Following a similar structure, our model has two stages. The
first stage is an image transform which is performed by the outer layers in the
retina. Here it is modelled by filtering the image with a bank of difference of
Gaussians with time-delays. The second stage is a time-dependent
analog-to-digital conversion which is performed by the inner layers in the
retina. Thanks to its conception, our coder enables scalability and bit
allocation across time. Also, our decoded images do not show annoying artefacts
such as ringing and block effects. As a whole, this article shows how to
capture the main properties of a biological system, here the retina, in order
to design a new efficient coder.Comment: 12 pages; Advanced Concepts for Intelligent Vision Systems (ACIVS
2011
Synthetic retina for AER systems development
Neuromorphic engineering tries to mimic biology in
information processing. Address-Event Representation (AER) is
a neuromorphic communication protocol for spiking neurons
between different layers. AER bio-inspired image sensor are
called “retina”. This kind of sensors measure visual information
not based on frames from real life and generates corresponding
events. In this paper we provide an alternative, based on cheap
FPGA, to this image sensors that takes images provided by an
analog video source (video composite signal), digitalizes it and
generates AER streams for testing purposes.Junta de Andalucía P06-TIC-01417Ministerio de Educación y Ciencia TEC2006-11730-C03-0
Real-time motor rotation frequency detection with event-based visual and spike-based auditory AER sensory integration for FPGA
Multisensory integration is commonly
used in various robotic areas to collect more
environmental information using different and
complementary types of sensors. Neuromorphic
engineers mimics biological systems behavior to
improve systems performance in solving engineering
problems with low power consumption. This work
presents a neuromorphic sensory integration scenario
for measuring the rotation frequency of a motor using
an AER DVS128 retina chip (Dynamic Vision Sensor)
and a stereo auditory system on a FPGA completely
event-based. Both of them transmit information with
Address-Event-Representation (AER). This
integration system uses a new AER monitor hardware
interface, based on a Spartan-6 FPGA that allows two
operational modes: real-time (up to 5 Mevps through
USB2.0) and data logger mode (up to 20Mevps for
33.5Mev stored in onboard DDR RAM). The sensory
integration allows reducing prediction error of the
rotation speed of the motor since audio processing
offers a concrete range of rpm, while DVS can be
much more accurate.Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad TEC2012-37868-C04-02/0
Recommended from our members
A biologically inspired spiking model of visual processing for image feature detection
To enable fast reliable feature matching or tracking in scenes, features need to be discrete and meaningful, and hence edge or corner features, commonly called interest points are often used for this purpose. Experimental research has illustrated that biological vision systems use neuronal circuits to extract particular features such as edges or corners from visual scenes. Inspired by this biological behaviour, this paper proposes a biologically inspired spiking neural network for the purpose of image feature extraction. Standard digital images are processed and converted to spikes in a manner similar to the processing that transforms light into spikes in the retina. Using a hierarchical spiking network, various types of biologically inspired receptive fields are used to extract progressively complex image features. The performance of the network is assessed by examining the repeatability of extracted features with visual results presented using both synthetic and real images
Streaming an image through the eye: The retina seen as a dithered scalable image coder
We propose the design of an original scalable image coder/decoder that is
inspired from the mammalians retina. Our coder accounts for the time-dependent
and also nondeterministic behavior of the actual retina. The present work
brings two main contributions: As a first step, (i) we design a deterministic
image coder mimicking most of the retinal processing stages and then (ii) we
introduce a retinal noise in the coding process, that we model here as a dither
signal, to gain interesting perceptual features. Regarding our first
contribution, our main source of inspiration will be the biologically plausible
model of the retina called Virtual Retina. The main novelty of this coder is to
show that the time-dependent behavior of the retina cells could ensure, in an
implicit way, scalability and bit allocation. Regarding our second
contribution, we reconsider the inner layers of the retina. We emit a possible
interpretation for the non-determinism observed by neurophysiologists in their
output. For this sake, we model the retinal noise that occurs in these layers
by a dither signal. The dithering process that we propose adds several
interesting features to our image coder. The dither noise whitens the
reconstruction error and decorrelates it from the input stimuli. Furthermore,
integrating the dither noise in our coder allows a faster recognition of the
fine details of the image during the decoding process. Our present paper goal
is twofold. First, we aim at mimicking as closely as possible the retina for
the design of a novel image coder while keeping encouraging performances.
Second, we bring a new insight concerning the non-deterministic behavior of the
retina.Comment: arXiv admin note: substantial text overlap with arXiv:1104.155
Recommended from our members
O(N)-Space Spatiotemporal Filter for Reducing Noise in Neuromorphic Vision Sensors
Neuromorphic vision sensors are an emerging technology inspired by how retina processing images. A neuromorphic vision sensor only reports when a pixel value changes rather than continuously outputting the value every frame as is done in an 'ordinary' Active Pixel Sensor (ASP). This move from a continuously sampled system to an asynchronous event driven one effectively allows for much faster sampling rates; it also fundamentally changes the sensor interface. In particular, these sensors are highly sensitive to noise, as any additional event reduces the bandwidth, and thus effectively lowers the sampling rate. In this work we introduce a novel spatiotemporal filter with O(N)O(N) memory complexity for reducing background activity noise in neuromorphic vision sensors. Our design consumes 10× less memory and has 100× reduction in error compared to previous designs. Our filter is also capable of recovering real events and can pass up to 180 percent more real events
Improving Texture Categorization with Biologically Inspired Filtering
Within the domain of texture classification, a lot of effort has been spent
on local descriptors, leading to many powerful algorithms. However,
preprocessing techniques have received much less attention despite their
important potential for improving the overall classification performance. We
address this question by proposing a novel, simple, yet very powerful
biologically-inspired filtering (BF) which simulates the performance of human
retina. In the proposed approach, given a texture image, after applying a DoG
filter to detect the "edges", we first split the filtered image into two "maps"
alongside the sides of its edges. The feature extraction step is then carried
out on the two "maps" instead of the input image. Our algorithm has several
advantages such as simplicity, robustness to illumination and noise, and
discriminative power. Experimental results on three large texture databases
show that with an extremely low computational cost, the proposed method
improves significantly the performance of many texture classification systems,
notably in noisy environments. The source codes of the proposed algorithm can
be downloaded from https://sites.google.com/site/nsonvu/code.Comment: 11 page
From Vision Sensor to Actuators, Spike Based Robot Control through Address-Event-Representation
One field of the neuroscience is the neuroinformatic whose aim is to
develop auto-reconfigurable systems that mimic the human body and brain. In
this paper we present a neuro-inspired spike based mobile robot. From
commercial cheap vision sensors converted into spike information, through
spike filtering for object recognition, to spike based motor control models. A
two wheel mobile robot powered by DC motors can be autonomously
controlled to follow a line drown in the floor. This spike system has been
developed around the well-known Address-Event-Representation mechanism to
communicate the different neuro-inspired layers of the system. RTC lab has
developed all the components presented in this work, from the vision sensor, to
the robot platform and the FPGA based platforms for AER processing.Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TEC2006-11730-C03-02Junta de Andalucía P06-TIC-0141
Building Blocks for Spikes Signals Processing
Neuromorphic engineers study models and
implementations of systems that mimic neurons behavior in the
brain. Neuro-inspired systems commonly use spikes to
represent information. This representation has several
advantages: its robustness to noise thanks to repetition, its
continuous and analog information representation using digital
pulses, its capacity of pre-processing during transmission time,
... , Furthermore, spikes is an efficient way, found by nature, to
codify, transmit and process information. In this paper we
propose, design, and analyze neuro-inspired building blocks
that can perform spike-based analog filters used in signal
processing. We present a VHDL implementation for FPGA.
Presented building blocks take advantages of the spike rate
coded representation to perform a massively parallel processing
without complex hardware units, like floating point arithmetic
units, or a large memory. Those low requirements of hardware
allow the integration of a high number of blocks inside a FPGA,
allowing to process fully in parallel several spikes coded signals.Junta de Andalucía P06-TIC-O1417Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TEC2009-10639-C04-02Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación TEC2006-11730-C03-0
- …