sion systems, however, is still pure image acquisition without pattern recognition. Mitsubishi Electric's Artificial Retina Chip (ARC) may change this.
This optical receptor chip is a parallel-processing image sensor including intelligent pattern recognition capabilities. It can catch features of an image in less than 200 microseco
nds, or about 10 times faster than conventional image systems that operate sequentially. Like the human retina, it extracts important visual information (e.g., outlines, movements, or edges) and matches basic patterns in parallel to the capturing process.
The ARC supports resolutions of 480 by 640 pixels with 32-bit colors and frame rates of up to 1000 Hz. The first industrial implementations in robotics, remote monitoring, and teleconferencing are under development in Japan, though commercial products are not expected this year. At CeBIT in Hannover, Germany, this year, Mitsubishi Electric demonstrated several interactive games deploying the ARC. In one game, visitors could virtually throw a javelin, with the ARC the sensor of a digital camera. The chip analyzed the dynamics of the arm movement. A PC calculated the javelin's ballistics.
A Chip That Sees
