Devolopment of a parallel analog vision chip for early vision

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The vision chip is a novel image processing system, which is designed using analog CMOS Very Large Scale Integrated (VLSI) circuit technology, inspired by structures and functions of the retina. Since images projected on the chip are processed in parallel by dynamical properties of the VLSI circuit, the chip is expected to give a breakthrough to fatal disadvantages of conventional digital image processing systems in the real-time image processing. The purpose of this project is to design a vision chip which mimics functions and structures of the retinal bipolar cell network. The followings are the summary of results we obtained in 1994-1995.1.A resistive network model of the retinal bipolar cell was developed and the functions of the network were studied quantitatively. The circuit was found to reproduce the response properties of the retinal bipolar cell, e.g., smooting and contrast enhancement operations on images.2.Using the model, the function of retinal bipolar cell network was formulated in terms of the standard regularization theory of early vision.3.An analog VLSI circuit of the model was designed and performances of the circuit were analyzed with the simulation software PSPICE.4.A vision chip inspired by the model was fabricated through the MOSIS.5.We further studied temporal properties of bipolar cell network by incorporating dynamical elements in above model. The model was found to explaine the temporal properties of retinal bipolar cell response.