Developed by a team led by University of Maryland (UMD) computer scientists, the camera system mimics the involuntary movements used by the human eye to maintain clear and stable vision. The team’s prototyping and testing of the camera is called the Artificial Microsaccade-Enhanced Event Camera (AMI-EV). Based on microsaccades, which are small and quick eye movements that involuntarily occur when a person tries to focus their view. Through these minute yet continuous movements, the human eye can keep focus on an object and its visual textures - such as colour, depth and shadowing - accurately over time.
In early testing, AMI-EV was able to capture and display movement accurately in a variety of contexts, including human pulse detection and rapidly moving shape identification. The researchers also found that AMI-EV could capture motion in tens of thousands of frames per second, outperforming most typically available commercial cameras, which capture 30 to 1000 frames per second on average. The team believes this smoother and more realistic depiction of motion could be pivotal in applications ranging from creating more immersive augmented reality experiences and better security monitoring to improving how astronomers capture images in space.
More information:
https://www.theengineer.co.uk/content/news/human-eye-inspires-vision-system-for-robotics