An FPGA-based Hardware Accelerator for Simulating Spatiotemporal Neurons

Simulating spatiotemporal neurons is fundamental to understanding motion detection mechanisms in the primary visual cortex and cloning these mechanisms in digital systems. We present a hardware accelerator that leverages the parallelism of a modern Field Programmable Gate Array ( FPGA) to increase the speed of spatiotemporal computations by 1 similar to 2 orders of magnitude for video framebuffer sizes up to 128x128x25 pixels. The accelerator is primarily intended for running simulations of large spatiotemporal neuron populations but can also be used in computer vision applications that require high-speed spatiotemporal processing such as realtime motion detection.