A foveated aer imager chip

Abstract

This thesis presents a foveated imager chip, an imager inspired by the retina in the human eye. The imager shares some functionalities of the retina, with sharp vision in the centre and motion detection in the periphery. To achieve this we use two types of pixels, static pixels emulating the cones and more space consuming dynamic pixels emulating the rods. Inspired by the neurons of biological nervous systems, they emit short voltage pulses, the static pixels with a frequency proportional to light intensity, the dynamic pixels whenever they detect a relative change in irradiance. The pulses are transmitted off-chip by the Address Event Representation (AER), a communication protocol that emulates the behavior of the point-to-point connection in the nervous system. Using the nervous system as model for circuit design offered many advantages compared to digital cameras, such as compactness, low latency, etc.