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.
Highlights
Most modern robotic systems still lack the ability to effectively and autonomously interact with their environment using visual information
The simulated data used in this work reproduces the activity of an event driven sensor in response to a bar moving horizontally [Left to Right (LR), Right to Left (RL)], vertically [Top to Bottom (TB), 1We explored the real-world applicability of the underlying motion detection mechanism prior to this work in which we demonstrated the functionality of the underlying given variable contrast and event-rates in natural environments (Milde et al, 2015, 2018; Schoepe et al, 2019)
Our investigation starts with the characterization of the eccentric down-sampling Spiking Elementary Motion Detector (sEMD)’s response to a simulated bar moving in the four cardinal directions with a speed of 0.3 px/ms: left to right, right to left, top to bottom and bottom to top
Summary
Most modern robotic systems still lack the ability to effectively and autonomously interact with their environment using visual information. For example locating and retrieving a particular resource, require an attentive system that allows robots to isolate their target(s) within their environment as well as process complex top-down information. Teleceptive sensors, for example those using ultrasound or infra-red light, are common in engineered systems, and are exploited by some natural organisms for navigation and object tracking (Nelson and MacIver, 2006; Jones and Holderied, 2007). In particular, represents one of the important attentional cues for facilitating agent-environment interactions (Cavanagh, 1992), and is used by natural organisms to avoid obstacles, respond quickly and coherently to an external stimulus within a scene, or to focus attention to a certain feature of a scene (Abrams and Christ, 2003).
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