Experiments with lateral inhibition in two-dimensional photoreceptor arrays

The process known as lateral inhibition has been observed in many sensory systems from a wide range of biological organisms. Regarded as a crucial step in preprocessing sensory information, it has been recreated in the form of two-dimensional arrays of visual receptor cells. Lateral inhibition (LI) is applied by two different means on arrays of pixels in two different configurations. One method is a dynamic algorithm that it applied to a 25-cell rectangular array. A second, static method is used on a nineteen-cell hexagonal array. Both circuits were implemented in VLSI using 3 μm CMOS technology