Review of Bio-inspired Silicon Retina: From Cell to System Level Implementation

Neuroscience has made substantial progress towards describing the components, connection architectures and computational processes of visual pathways. Neuroscience always provides a constant challenge to technologist by giving the new insights into biological systems. In-spite of tremendous progress in computing hardware and software platforms, it remains true that natural biological systems like visual processing system outperforms technological computers while performing many tasks and on many metrics e.g. near sensor computation and power consumption. This paper is the review of work done worldwide towards development of artificial visual system. Introduction to biological retina and silicon retina is given to better understand biological background. Then efforts of various researchers towards development of mathematical models, device models and circuit models are described. Various types of silicon retinas for vision cameras are being discussed as a system implementation. Still there is a scope for improvement in many areas; particularly due to frequent surprises given by biologist. Finally outlook is provided as a clue to future research for silicon retina and associated signal processing circuit.