Silicon retina system applicable to robot vision

Abstract

A novel robot vision system was configured using a silicon retina and FPGA circuit. Silicon retina has been developed to mimic the parallel circuit structure of the vertebrate retina. The silicon retina used here is an analog CMOS very largescale integrated circuit which executes Laplacian-Gaussian (/spl nabla//sup 2/G)-like filtering and frame subtraction on the image in real time. FPGA circuit controls a silicon retina and executes image processing depending on application of the system. This robot vision system can achieve real time and robust computations under natural illumination with a compact hardware and a low power consumption.