The retina is a part of central nervous system in the vertebrate and plays important roles in the early stage of visual information system which processes the images seen by eyes by means of analog neural network.
Dr. Tetsuya Yagi, a professor of Osaka University in Japan succeeded in the development of Silicon Retina which carries out fundamental image preprocessing functions in real time by emulating analog neural network of the vertebrate retina by means of a CMOS analog parallel-processing VLSI.
He has then advanced the technology to brain neural network emulating analog-digital mixed Intelligent Vision Sensor (IVS), which could carry out highly complex image preprocessing by combining Silicon Retina with FPGA.
The IVS technology of Dr. Yagi was transferred to Neural Image Co. Ltd, which subsequently developed a prototype IVS product unit in September, 2005. Commercial product of IVS was launched in October,2007,with a product name of ASPECTUS.
