Detecting global spatial-temporal events: saccadic suppression

You may think that while are watching a schema, your eyes move smoothly and continuously to investigate the circuitry, but that is not the case. Your eyes fixate on a part of the circuit hold for a moment then suddenly jump to a new position where a particular visual detail attracts your eyes. During this jump or saccade the eyes move rapidly and we hardly notice that, relative to our eye position, the entire visual world globally shifts. Vision is in some sense turned off during saccades, which is called saccadic suppression. This paper presents a neuromorphic algorithm to detect these spatial-temporal events from the input flow. The algorithm of the saccadic suppression event detection is implemented on the standard cellular nonlinear network universal machine environment. The processing time is roughly one millisecond on the ACE4k CNN-UM chip in the Aladdin environment, and therefore it can serve as a common function in any real-time spatial-temporal algorithm. The saccadic suppression event detector can be used in different areas such as video shot detection or to define the instant when the time-dependent part of the algorithm, e.g. homotopy, has to be initialized.