Silicon models of visual cortical processing

Receptive field structures found in the visual cortex of the mammalian brain act as oriented, localized spatial frequency filters. There has been interest in the use of such receptive field profiles for image coding and texture processing. These receptive field structures resemble Gabor filters. Systems employing such Gabor filters have been implemented in software for a variety of applications. We believe a hardware implementation of such cells will be helpful in artificial visual processing. We have implemented analog VLSI cells whose outputs resemble the receptive field profiles found in the visual cortex. We describe experimental results of our circuit. Our circuit is the first silicon model of visual cortical processing