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Science

Researchers Create Artificial Eye Chip 34

Posted by Hemos from the i-can-have-20/20 dept.
One of our ever loquacious AC's sent an interesting story over our way. A Researcher at Johns Hopkins has created an artifical eye chip that "has image sensing and object tracking" capabilites. This has been demonstrated in other systems, the key difference here: speed. One chip, rather then different chip sub-systems.
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Researchers Create Artificial Eye Chip More

Researchers Create Artificial Eye Chip

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  • 15 year old technology (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Its a 15-year old technology, pioneered at CalTech,
    but this product is a more efficient implementation of it.
    The sensor does preliminary signal processing such as dip segment detection, motion change, etc.
    in a similar fashion to the retina, by embedding
    thousand of non-linear elements like neural networks on the chip.
  • I attended a seminar this year with a professor from one of the service academies, who has been doing almost exactly the same thing. His model: fly eyes. Word is that the artificial eye his group created can follow a single turbine blade at some ungodly speed (~50,000 RPM). Very interesting stuff, but I think the pioneering work in the field was done many years ago at CalTech...
  • Then the monkeys will come to power, crushing the evil robot legions. In near time the monkeys will reign again. I can see it coming...

    (for more monkeys and robots... visit my website... i make movies of this nature...)

  • It sounds pretty and very gee whizz. But ... what does it do? It sounds like it does the same as existing hard/software low-level vision algorithms, faster. And what they do is, well, not a lot by real world standards (and actually they do it pretty fast already).

    (NB if someone knows better than me and it's really very cool, I defer in advance to their superior knowledge!)
  • Well, the intention of the creator doesn't seem to be focused on giving sight to the blind, but giving animal-like sight to robots, which can be almost as useful.

    I think you're right; this might have applications in "bionic" vision, but even in those who are congenitally blind, the basic hardwiring in the brain for vision may still be intact. There would certainly be an adjustment period for those who are given sight for the first time, but I doubt that it wouldn't take in their cases.
  • Every Logitech MouseMan comes with a retina chip designed here [www.csem.ch]

  • BZZT (Score:1)

    by matomira ( 2943 )
    er.. TrackMan
  • and you point is?

    actually, it's good that you avoided the the effort of making a point since your basis for one was all messed up. many communities do have audible signals at traffic lights - arlington, ma and dublin ireland spring to mind. not all techies are interested in more visual tech. lastly i seem to recall a story recently about a man who got his vision back after over fifty years - he lost it around the age of 5. he was able to process it, but he found it frightening.
  • I used to work on CMOS analog neuromorphic VLSI
    (at Hopkins for a while, no less). The field was very interesting back in the days when microprocessor speeds were at 66 MHz, but in today's 500 MHz plus world, there is very little benefit in neuromorphics except for mobile micro-robots, where power is a concern.

    Every other neural AI application is much better served using software running on high-speed digital machines. Of course, there are very, very few useful neural network applications period. We have gallantly figured out how to make neural nets learn, but they are not leading to the kinds of significant AI that we had originally thought.
  • Weirdo.
  • Simple. Wait until it's either bombing you, or shooting at you. The B-2 loses its stealth capabilities when its bomb bay doors are open. The F-117A loses them for a brief instant when it fires its missiles. Once the plane is locked onto, though, they're easier to track.
  • My friend, you'd be surprised what a person without vision is capable of. I'm not quite blind, but very close, and (I think,) I perform quite well as a sysadmin. People adapt, and learn to do things differently. As for the cost of a braille terminal, most state governments are more than willing to assist those in need with the cost of these devices. Except for that whole driving bit, a blind person can function just as well as a sighted one.
  • No kidding. If the last time you saw the world was 50 years ago, you'd think today's world was frightening, too. ;)
  • Minds are like parachutes... they work best when open

    But parachutes also work best when filled with air ;)
  • A standard, silicon-based sensor array can see into the near-infrared and into the ultraviolet. The limiting factor on most cameras, if I understand correctly, is the optics. The lenses etc. may absorb light that is too far into the ultraviolet, for instance. Naturally, a colour camera's colour filters will block out non-visible wavelengths, too. With enough care, though, you could probably build a camera that "saw" across the wider range mentioned above.


    Chromatic abberation would get ugly, however, as different wavelengths would be affected to very different degrees by the camera's lenses. This is probably what limits the camera's sensing into the ultraviolet (in the EUV/soft x-ray range, the lenses will cease to have much effect).


    The lower sensing limit is a bit harder to get around. To detect far infrared (including thermal infrared), you have to use special materials that respond to photons of these low energies, and more importantly you have to cool your detector so that "glow" from the camera and thermal noise don't swamp the signals that you are trying to measure. I played with a thermal infrared camera a while ago; it had a bulky housing that cooled the sensor with IIRC liquid helium (though in retrospect liquid nitrogen seems more likely, as it would do the job adequately and would be easier to contain).


    So, in summary, you could build an artificial eye that saw blurrily from the near infrared to moderately deep ultraviolet, but thermal infrared is a lot harder.

  • (Just when I felt like moving out of the ECE department...)

    Etienne-Cummings (from the article) is just one of our assistant professors. Imagine what our full time professors do. :)

    -Chris
  • Reminds me of this quote:
    "It's all fun and games till someone loses an eye." -Unknown
    Now we don't have to worry about poking out our eyes, becuase we could have them replace...

    Hmmm. Think about it.. Terminator vision.. I can see people having surgury just to get these bad boys.. Oh well.. I like my body how it is...
  • what would you think if all of a sudden you had some new sensory organ that was totally unfamiliar to you? it would be harder than learning a foreign language.

    At first. But the brain is hardwired to deal with vision; most of a regular human's sensory input comes from vision. I have no doubt that there would be a transitional period during which the user of bionic eyes would be disoriented and generally uncomfortable (headaches and whatnot)--even assuming that the brain didn't do any rewiring to devote resources normally allocated to vision to other things.

    second of all there exist techonlogies to help blind people already but they are not integrated into society because society frankly doesnt give a rats ass about people who are not considered 'the best'.

    I disagree. Yes, the technologies exist. But they're expensive and not integrated into what you broadly refer to as society because most of the participants in the society simply don't think about handicapped people all that much. It isn't malice or willful ignorance--it's the fact that most of us aren't impaired in such a manner that makes us ignorant. The technology is expensive and uncommon because it necessarily caters to a small section of the populace. In other words, there's no money in it. If most people were blind or deaf, you can bet your last dollar that the technology to assist blind and deaf people would be widespread, well-integrated and cheap.

    but the standards are not in place nor are they considered worthy of the time of 'true high tech' types, who only care about monster 3d cards, javascript, clickable glowing images, etc.

    See the previous point. Never ascribe to malice what can be explained by simple ignorance.

  • It's true that many major inventions come from military projects and the desire to learn how to kill each other more effective (nuclear bombs for example). But the end results are not always necessarily bad.

    The Internet, for example, was a project originally commissioned by the military, for military purposes (they wanted a more reliable communications network, that could more easily withstand having large portions of it taken out.) Some of the first computers were first created due to military interests (they wanted machines to help crack the enemy's codes or to work out missile trajectories.) A good deal of the advancements in space travel were because of the Cold War. GPS systems were also spawned by the military.

    Sure, it is questionably as to whether or not all such technologies are necessarily good for mankind. But the knowledge we gain does tend to find its way into useful applications such as in the field of medicine (for those who can afford it anyway :/ )

    It is sad that military motivations form such a large part of what urges humans to develop technology. But that's how things work. The end results aren't all bad.
  • Could an array of these track incoming aircraft?
    Passive tracking, no signals to attract HARM
    missles.

    I spent this weekend trying to think up a way
    to defeat stealth bombers. Optical seemed to
    be the best way.

    If the array could be made fast enough, it may
    even track cruise missles.

    Anybody remember the War issue of National
    Lampoon? They called war "science and technology
    at play".

    Just an oddball thinking.
  • If this is the kind of thing that gets your interest, try checking out the Institute For Neuroinformatics [unizh.ch]. In addition to building all of these sorts of vision chips, they also do work with real brain stuff, like anatomy and the like.

    I did programming for them last fall, so I got to know some of the people doing the chip work. Rather than doing it for the reasons presented above (ie, weapons/AI) a lot of this is done in the mindset of pure research. These chips also give us a method to test some of the ideas we have about how brains work. After all, if you can build one, you can understand one.

    In terms of making things like artificial eyes, we would first need to be able to track all of the neurons running from the eye to the rest of the brain, which is still out of the possibilities for the near future.

    Cool stuff, though.
  • Wow! High tech stuff. But if you combine artificial eyes with the latest advances in laser technology, it gives a whole new meaning to the phrase "If looks could kill..."

    Some puns can't be avoided....
    "Responsibility for my career? I'm just a freakin' phone monkey!"
  • It reminds me of the game postal - "It's always funny until somebody gets hurt... and then it's absoutely friggin' hilarious!"
    And also - "It's more fun than poking yourself in the eye!". Those two quotes from the same website.
    www.gopostal.com i think
  • This is perhaps the most important aspect of the research- to eventually come to an understanding of the computational and connective aspects of the brain. This is an incredible field of science that is just starting to gain recognition beyond those whose imaginations take this sort of stuff and place it in paranoid fantasies or the latest sci-fi novel. I predict in the next decade you will be seeing much more from these researchers and those like them. Hopefully my name will be attached to a discovery like this in the near future. Keep your eyes open
  • Interesting article. Just the kind that kinda makes me wish I was doing research work. Oh well, need more money first. :)

    But this "eye", with its peripheral sense and high definition central vision, would seem to make a good auto-targetting weapon system. You know, like the type normally seen in sci-fi films?

    But thanks to the on-chip processing and because it behaves very much like an organic eye element, it would be much faster. The mobile gun could easily make out motion and determine the expected path of the target and aim/fire appropriately. Would make for more deadly sentries.

    A more positive use of this would be perhaps for remote vision applications? While it is hardly an eye-replacement, it can serve to be a much better "camera" replacement. Especially if one is using it for flight AI purposes. By being able to determine relative motion and figure out what objects are doing around it, it can make for much higher accuracey self-navigated crafts. (Airlines, remote data gathering drones, etc..)

    Of course, I think a cool use would be for use in AI automatons.. a spider-like robot with object detection/reaction built into the optics.. it would behave more realistically since it can sense when something is approaching it and much more quickly. (I doubt this will lead to killer robots though.. they are only as deadly as we make it.. but then again, guess the argument can be that since we are basically copying nature in silicon, we really don't know exactly what it will do past a certain level of complexity, huh?)

    But cool.. just wonder when fully self-adaptive neural proccessor technology will mature. But it just might be that like this eye element, there is a much simpler path which won't seem intelligent at first. Who knows, right?

    - Wing
    - Reap the fires of the soul.
    - Harvest the passion of life.

  • I can see it now.. Microsoft Eyeball. It will have special video synchronization code so all GUI's other than Windows appear scrambled.

    It will work just like regular eyes, except you find you need to blink a lot more often. Sometimes everything will go blue for a second, but MS will blame Viagra.

    On a more positive note, maybe MS will FINALLY have some vision.

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