An adaptable foveating vision chip

In this work we present an adaptable foveating vision chip. This chip has no physical foveation; all its pixels are in the same uniform pattern. However with a given input signal it is possible to define areas of the chip which act as a fovea, returning high spatial resolution. The surrounding peripheral vision acts to return lower spatial resolution but much higher temporal resolution. Our chip is therefore able to achieve full spatial resolution via scanning of the fovea across the visual field. This operation is analogous to the functioning of the human eye. In the human eye however, the limitations of biology enforce a fixed fovea, while the optomechanics are highly efficient. In our structure, we acknowledge the limitations of physical optomechanics but use the advantages of silicon processing to achieve dynamic foveation. This paper discusses the algorithm, its implementation and simulated results describing its responses and power consumption