Artificial electronic retina recognises handwritten numbers

Mani Teja Vijjapu, an electrical engineering Ph.D. student, Khaled Nabil Salama and colleagues are said to have designed and fabricated an array of photoreceptors that detect the intensity of visible light through a change in electrical capacitance, mimicking the behaviour of the eye’s rod retina cells.

When the array was connected to an electronic CMOS-sensing circuit and a spiking neural network (a single-layer network with 100 output neurons), it was able to recognise 70 per cent of handwritten numbers.

“The ultimate goal of our research in this area is to develop efficient neuromorphic vision sensors to build efficient cameras for computer vision applications,” Salama said in a statement. “Existing systems use photodetectors that require power for their operation and thus consume a lot of energy, even on standby. In contrast, our proposed photoreceptors are capacitive devices that don’t consume static power for their operation.”