Researchers Create Artificial Eye Chip 34
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.
15 year old technology (Score:1)
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.
Not the first (Score:1)
And this is the end... (Score:1)
(for more monkeys and robots... visit my website... i make movies of this nature...)
Where's the beef? (Score:1)
(NB if someone knows better than me and it's really very cool, I defer in advance to their superior knowledge!)
this does not help blind people (Score:1)
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.
Artificial retinas here, too (Score:1)
BZZT (Score:1)
this does not help blind people (Score:1)
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.
CMOS Neuromorphics going no where (Score:1)
(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.
This is the start (Score:1)
Can it made to see in infrared? (Score:1)
this does not help blind people (Score:1)
this does not help blind people (Score:1)
This is the start (Score:1)
But parachutes also work best when filled with air
Sensing at unusual wavelengths. (Score:1)
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.
Johns Hopkins (Score:1)
Etienne-Cummings (from the article) is just one of our assistant professors. Imagine what our full time professors do.
-Chris
*giggles* (Score:1)
"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...
this does not help blind people (Score:1)
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.
Military creations (Score:1)
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.
Can it made to see in infrared? (Score:1)
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.
Other place to look: (Score:1)
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.
I apologize in advance... (Score:1)
Some puns can't be avoided....
"Responsibility for my career? I'm just a freakin' phone monkey!"
*giggles* (Score:1)
And also - "It's more fun than poking yourself in the eye!". Those two quotes from the same website.
www.gopostal.com i think
Computational Neuroscience (Score:1)
hmm.. learning from nature.. (Score:2)
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.
What do you want to see today? (Score:2)
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.