Texture segregation employing orientation-selective analog multi-chip vision system

A high resolution neuromorphic multi-chip vision system was fabricated to emulate the orientation selective response of the simple cell in the primary visual cortex. The vision system consists of two types of analog chips: a silicon retina and a simple cell chip. The center-surround concentric receptive fields of the silicon retina are aggregated in the simple cell chip, mimicking the hierarchical architecture in the visual system of the brain. Both chips have 100 times 100 pixels. Using the orientation-selective outputs obtained from the multi-chip system, texture segregation was conducted based on a computational model inspired by neurophysiology. The texture image was filtered by the two orthogonally oriented receptive fields of the multi-chip system and the filtered images were combined to segregate the area of different texture orientation with the aid of field programmable gate array (FPGA). The present multi-chip system is useful to emulate and verify computational models for texture segregation of the cortical cells