Eye-inspired imaging chip will extend video capabilities

The ‘silicon retina’ is being developed by a European consortium and will have immediate applications for the electronics industry and for machine vision — with artificial prosthesis for blind people representing a long-term goal.

Charge-coupled devices (CCDs) and complementary metal-oxide-semiconductors (CMOSs) are the most commonly used imaging sensors and have found their way into a variety of devices including mobile phones and laptops.

‘If you’re taking photos that’s fine, because you need every single pixel,’ said project partner Dr Konstantin Nikolic of Imperial College London.

‘But if you’re making a continuous film, what happens is there is massive redundancy of information. If you’re filming at 40fps, each frame consists of millions of pixels, yet there is very little different from frame to frame.’

Nikolic explained that the retina acts as a filter by only sending on salient spatial and temporal information to the brain via the optic nerve.

‘It’s like a microprocessor that compresses data — it’s very efficient at reducing the bandwidth to transmit the information. Say we have an input of about 100 million pixels on the retina, the output is only about a million pixels.’