Biomimetic Signal Conditioning and Light Adaptation for Compound Vision Sensors

Previous research efforts in mimicking the compound eye of Musca domestica, the common house fly, in hardware have primarily been focused on optical designs to achieve the fast, analog, parallel processing, and motion hyperacuity properties of the biological system. While these optical platforms have shown promising results, nearly all proposed advantages of utilizing a fly-inspired sensor have been discovered through the use of software simulation with very little or no effort being made to validate these simulations using the actual fly-inspired optics. The work presented in this paper advances the frontier of compound vision research by mimicking the core processing systems of the fly's intermediate neural layer structure (the lamina) in hardware. The hardware designs were kept as biomimetic as possible, and the unique motion hyperacuity characteristic of Musca's visual system was preserved in each circuit design. It will be shown that an effective light adaptation system can be designed that is both analog and parallel by directly mimicking the fly's visual system. The proof-of-concept designs presented in this paper are an important first step in turning the novel compound optical designs of the past decade into useful sensors that can function in dynamic real-world environments.