An orientation-selective multi-chip aVLSI applicable to texture analysis

A high resolution neuromorphic aVLSI was fabricated to emulate the orientation selective response of the simple cell in the primary visual cortex. The aVLSI circuits consist of two analog chips: a silicon retina and an orientation chip. The center-surround concentric receptive fields of the silicon retina are aggregated in the orientation chip, mimicking the hierarchical architecture in the visual system of the brain. Both chips have 100 × 100 pixels and therefore, this multi-chip system is applicable to robotic vision. Using the orientation-selective outputs obtained from the multi-chip system, a texture segregation was conducted based on a similar algorithm of the energy computation. The texture image was filtered by the two orthogonally oriented receptive fields of multi-chip system and the filtered images were combined to segregate the area of different texture orientation with the aid of a PC. The study demonstrated that the orientation-selective multi-chip system developed is useful to emulate the texture segregation employing a fundamental architecture to generate the simple cell response in the primary visual cortex and is applicable to robotic vision.