Part of Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 4 (NIPS 1991)
Ronald Benson, Tobi Delbrück
Biological retinas extract spatial and temporal features in an attempt to reduce the complexity of performing visual tasks. We have built and tested a silicon retina which encodes several useful temporal features found in ver(cid:173) tebrate retinas. The cells in our silicon retina are selective to direction, highly sensitive to positive contrast changes around an ambient light level, and tuned to a particular velocity. Inhibitory connections in the null di(cid:173) rection perform the direction selectivity we desire. This silicon retina is on a 4.6 x 6.8mm die and consists of a 47 x 41 array of photoreceptors.