Retina Simulation Model And Its Perceived Performance Analysis

Biologist Rosen have said:"from evolution point of view, physical system is the best encyclopedia for human to solve complex problems." Among all chapters of the encyclopedia, the eye is definitely one of the most brilliant one, which has astonishing powerful function, intricate connections and structure, highly precise control mechanism, even Darwin was shocked by eye and praised it as "extremely perfect and complex organ". Our work is inspired by the most important part of the eye--retina, which is in charge of receiving and processing visual signals.Long time ago, people had recognized the retina structure is really complex, however, some basic but essential questions, such as how many layers of retina can be divided into, how many types of cells are included in different layer, what is the number of each type of cell and how they distribute, are gradually clear in recent year with the development of anatomy, electrophysiology, cell morphology and so on. Based on these data, we simulated a highly realistic retina model. A variety of experiments can be designed based on the model, such as object detection probability of retina, object representation efficiency of retina, the retina balance property under multiple constrains(such as accuracy, real-time, energy consumption, computation complexity, etc.) and so on.This model presents a new direction or a new perspective for some difficult problems not well resolved in traditional way. For example, the design of artificial retina chips. Because of limited size, the hardware complexity of artificial retina can not be too high; Because of heat issue, energy consumption can not be too much; Because of real-time response requirements, signal processing must be fast and accurate. It is very hard to balance these constraints which conflict with each other. However, these tasks are exactly what the retina usually does, and it does really well. This inspires us that if the balance mechanism can be introduced into artificial retina design, it would be very helpful. And also, this model can be used for real-time scene representation and image processing. Retina divides visual signals into color pathways, brightness pathways, motion pathways and some other pathways to form internal representation for further processing, which dramatically improves the efficiency of representation and meanwhile significantly reduces the computation complexity. This method may provide a new direction for real-time scene representation and image processing. Meanwhile, since the model is highly close to the real retina, it can test physical experiment to verity the physical assumptions, and future to raise new questions or directions to physiology, neuroscience and other subjects.Actually, there have been some simulation models on retina. According to their fields and goals, these models can generally be divided into three categories. The first category is mainly for neuroscience. The second category may focus on computer science applications. The third category may face to micro electronic hardware design. These models are often too detailed to demonstrate retina nature as a whole, or often too general to include key parts and essential features, and worse, the information processing process of these models are far from what the real retina does. The model we presented not only simulates a variety of retina cells and their distribution, but also simulates intricate connections and structure of the retina, not only is loyal to the physical processing details, but also is easy to demonstrate the overall features of the retina. We believe this would be a beneficial attempt and provide a new perspective of thinking.