Event-Based Eccentric Motion Detection Exploiting Time Difference Encoding

Giulia D'Angelo; Ella Janotte; Thorben Schoepe; James O'Keeffe; Moritz B Milde; Elisabetta Chicca; Chiara Bartolozzi

doi:10.3389/fnins.2020.00451

Event-Based Eccentric Motion Detection Exploiting Time Difference Encoding

Front Neurosci. 2020 May 8:14:451. doi: 10.3389/fnins.2020.00451. eCollection 2020.

Authors

Giulia D'Angelo¹, Ella Janotte², Thorben Schoepe², James O'Keeffe³, Moritz B Milde⁴, Elisabetta Chicca², Chiara Bartolozzi¹

Affiliations

¹ Event Driven Perception for Robotics, Italian Institute of Technology, iCub Facility, Genoa, Italy.
² Faculty of Technology and Center of Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC), Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany.
³ Biosciences Institute, Newcastle University, Newcastle upon Tyne, United Kingdom.
⁴ International Centre for Neuromorphic Systems, The MARCS Institute, Western Sydney University, Sydney, NSW, Australia.

Abstract

Attentional selectivity tends to follow events considered as interesting stimuli. Indeed, the motion of visual stimuli present in the environment attract our attention and allow us to react and interact with our surroundings. Extracting relevant motion information from the environment presents a challenge with regards to the high information content of the visual input. In this work we propose a novel integration between an eccentric down-sampling of the visual field, taking inspiration from the varying size of receptive fields (RFs) in the mammalian retina, and the Spiking Elementary Motion Detector (sEMD) model. We characterize the system functionality with simulated data and real world data collected with bio-inspired event driven cameras, successfully implementing motion detection along the four cardinal directions and diagonally.

Keywords: attentional selectivity; bio-inspired visual system; eccentric down-sampling; event driven; humanoid robotics; motion detection; spiking elementary motion detection.