Suggestions for a biologically inspired spiking retina using order-based coding

This paper discusses some new suggestions for designing hardware vision systems that take inspiration from spike-based biological image processing. The key idea is to modify already existing Address Event Representation (AER) designs so that there is a periodic reset signal that can be generated every time some predefined proportion of "neurons" has emitted a spike. Each "neuron" only emits at most one spike per processing cycle, but the most strongly activated neurons fire first, ensuring that information about the image is transmitted with maximum efficiency. Simulations demonstrate that this sort of design can allow image reconstruction under conditions where only a few percent of the units have emitted a spike. This means that the reset signal can be triggered at high rates allowing images to be processed at very high clock rates but in a way that could automatically adjust to variations in environmental conditions including scene contrast.