Project looks at human eye to sharpen sight of robots and drones

The EPSRC-funded Internet of Silicon Retinas (IOSIRE) project, led by researchers from Kings College London and also involving University College London and Kingston University, is aiming to develop advanced machine-to-machine communication systems that capture and transmit images from highly efficient vision sensors mimicking the human retina.

Conventional cameras generate entirely new images for each frame, despite the fact that much of the picture remains the same as that of the previous one. This wastes a considerable amount of memory, computing power and time, according to the UCL principal investigator Yiannis Andreopoulos.

“If you are processing an image to analyse what is happening in a scene, you often end up throwing away most of the background information, because you are only interested in particular shapes or objects,” he said.

In contrast, recently developed dynamic vision sensors (DVS) mimic the way the retina works, by only updating the image at those points where a movement or change in the scene has occurred. When an object moves within a scene it reflects light, which is detected instantly by the sensor, said Andreopoulos.