113 research outputs found
AER Building Blocks for Multi-Layer Multi-Chip Neuromorphic Vision Systems
A 5-layer neuromorphic vision processor whose components
communicate spike events asychronously using the address-eventrepresentation
(AER) is demonstrated. The system includes a retina
chip, two convolution chips, a 2D winner-take-all chip, a delay line
chip, a learning classifier chip, and a set of PCBs for computer
interfacing and address space remappings. The components use a
mixture of analog and digital computation and will learn to classify
trajectories of a moving object. A complete experimental setup and
measurements results are shown.UniĂłn Europea IST-2001-34124 (CAVIAR)Ministerio de Ciencia y TecnologĂa TIC-2003-08164-C0
Focal-Plane Change Triggered Video Compression for Low-Power Vision Sensor Systems
Video sensors with embedded compression offer significant energy savings in transmission but incur energy losses in the complexity of the encoder. Energy efficient video compression architectures for CMOS image sensors with focal-plane change detection are presented and analyzed. The compression architectures use pixel-level computational circuits to minimize energy usage by selectively processing only pixels which generate significant temporal intensity changes. Using the temporal intensity change detection to gate the operation of a differential DCT based encoder achieves nearly identical image quality to traditional systems (4dB decrease in PSNR) while reducing the amount of data that is processed by 67% and reducing overall power consumption reduction of 51%. These typical energy savings, resulting from the sparsity of motion activity in the visual scene, demonstrate the utility of focal-plane change triggered compression to surveillance vision systems
Semi-Dense 3D Reconstruction with a Stereo Event Camera
Event cameras are bio-inspired sensors that offer several advantages, such as
low latency, high-speed and high dynamic range, to tackle challenging scenarios
in computer vision. This paper presents a solution to the problem of 3D
reconstruction from data captured by a stereo event-camera rig moving in a
static scene, such as in the context of stereo Simultaneous Localization and
Mapping. The proposed method consists of the optimization of an energy function
designed to exploit small-baseline spatio-temporal consistency of events
triggered across both stereo image planes. To improve the density of the
reconstruction and to reduce the uncertainty of the estimation, a probabilistic
depth-fusion strategy is also developed. The resulting method has no special
requirements on either the motion of the stereo event-camera rig or on prior
knowledge about the scene. Experiments demonstrate our method can deal with
both texture-rich scenes as well as sparse scenes, outperforming
state-of-the-art stereo methods based on event data image representations.Comment: 19 pages, 8 figures, Video: https://youtu.be/Qrnpj2FD1e
Self or other: Directors’ attitudes towards policy initiatives for external board evaluation
Recurrent crises in corporate governance have board practice and created policy pressure to assess the effectiveness of boards. Since the 1990s boards have faced calls to undertake regular, formal evaluation. Since 2010, the UK Corporate Governance Code has urged large corporations to engage outside parties to conduct them at least every three years, a move that other jurisdictions have copied. Despite this policy importance, little research has been conducted into processes or outcomes of board evaluation. This study explores the attitudes of directors on evaluation, whether self-administered or facilitated by others. We find acceptance of the principle but reservations about the value and even honesty in questionnaire-based approaches. We find scepticism about, but also acknowledgement of, the benefits of using outside facilitators, especially for their objectivity and because their interviewing elicits insights into board dynamics. As this practice expands beyond listed companies to non-listed ones, charities, and even governance branches of government, our findings point to a need to professionalise outside facilitation
Influence of indoor-cat group size and dominance rank on urinary cortisol
Domestic cats (Felis silvestris catus) are often housed indoors both singly and in groups. However, there is a lack of studies dealing with cat-cat relationships, group composition and effects of environmental parameters on the well-being of privately-owned cats. One way to index the effects of stressful situations is to measure glucocorticoid levels, as glucocorticoids are released from the adrenal cortex in response to stress-induced activation of the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis. Therefore, we investigated the influence of single and group housing on basal urinary cortisol levels of indoor-only domestic cats in private households, taking into account dominance
status and environmental parameters. Urine samples were collected non-invasively by owners from six single-housed cats and six alphaomega animal pairs of multi-cat households. Dominance status in group-housed cats was determined by competition test series.
Additionally, we compared cortisol levels of privately-owned cats with those of shelter cats. Results showed that basal urinary cortisol levels of cats in private households are neither influenced by housing style (single cat vs multi cat) nor by individuals’ dominance status. Correlations indicated a positive influence of human density, number of persons per household, and number of m2 available to cats on basal urinary cortisol levels, whereas cat-related parameters such as number of cats per household, number of m2 per cat, and number of persons per cat, did not have any significant influence on basal urinary cortisol levels. A comparison of basal urinary cortisol levels of privately-owned and shelter cats revealed no influence of location (private household, shelter) and group type (single, group [dominant or subordinate]) on basal urinary cortisol levels. This study is the first to investigate basal urinary cortisol levels of domestic cats in private households and an animal shelter considering housing style, dominance status, and environmental parameters
A multi-chip pulse-based neuromorphic infrastructure and its application to a model of orientation selectivity
Chicca E, Whatley AM, Lichtsteiner P, et al. A multi-chip pulse-based neuromorphic infrastructure and its application to a model of orientation selectivity. IEEE-Transactions on Circuits and Systems I: Regular Papers. 2007;54(5):981-993.The growing interest in pulse-mode processing by neural networks is encouraging the development of hardware implementations of massively parallel networks of integrate-and-fire neurons distributed over multiple chips. Address-event representation (AER) has long been considered a convenient transmission protocol for spike based neuromorphic devices. One missing, long-needed feature of AER-based systems is the ability to acquire data from complex neuromorphic systems and to stimulate them using suitable data. We have implemented a general-purpose solution in the form of a peripheral component interconnect (PCI) board (the PCI-AER board) supported by software. We describe the main characteristics of the PCI-AER board, and of the related supporting software. To show the functionality of the PCI-AER infrastructure we demonstrate a reconfigurable multichip neuromorphic system for feature selectivity which models orientation tuning properties of cortical neurons
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