Signal Flow Platform for Mapping and Simulation of Vertebrate Retina for Sensor Systems

Our visual processing system is remarkably good; the retina is nothing like the CMOS image sensor, or for that matter, any of the vision processing architectures that have driven vision systems research for over three decades. Therefore, before embarking upon the complex task of architectural mapping of the retina into hardware, it is essential to gain a realistic insight into the theoretical functions of the retina. In addition, an understanding of the kinds of chemical/electrical interactions taking place must be ascertained in order to venture into the next insurmountable task - the simulation platform. This paper presents a generic signal flow architecture for the mapping of the vertebrate retina derived from ionic current movements and interactions. The approach pursued is focused on the functional behavior of the signal that traverses from the photoreceptor to the ganglion cell in the architecture through transforming the system of nonlinear ordinary differential equations (ODEs) into an equivalent set of non-linear integral equations to cope with the singularity characteristic of retinal systems, providing an increase in the computational speed of ~36 % when compared with the conventional ODE methods, thus enhancing the realization of a functional retina as part of future hardware-based sensor systems.