Object contour tracking as inspired by the "MAD retina" paradigm

An artificial retina intimately associates an imager with processing facilities on the same VLSI circuit. We investigate how a priori structural knowledge can be exploited to analyse raw image data within such a device. Massive parallelism together with severe VLSI constraints lead to original choices regarding information representation and processing. In particular, it is explained why and how the respective potentialities of analog and digital hardware can be advantageously combined within the retina microcosm. As an exemplary application, we then concentrate on and illustrate the problem of object contour tracking.