Saliency-Driven Image Acuity Modulation on a Reconfigurable Array of Spiking Silicon Neurons

Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 17 (NIPS 2004)

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Authors

R. Vogelstein, Udayan Mallik, Eugenio Culurciello, Gert Cauwenberghs, Ralph Etienne-Cummings

Abstract

We have constructed a system that uses an array of 9,600 spiking sili- con neurons, a fast microcontroller, and digital memory, to implement a reconfigurable network of integrate-and-fire neurons. The system is designed for rapid prototyping of spiking neural networks that require high-throughput communication with external address-event hardware. Arbitrary network topologies can be implemented by selectively rout- ing address-events to specific internal or external targets according to a memory-based projective field mapping. The utility and versatility of the system is demonstrated by configuring it as a three-stage network that accepts input from an address-event imager, detects salient regions of the image, and performs spatial acuity modulation around a high-resolution fovea that is centered on the location of highest salience.