André van Schaik

Wednesday 9th May 2018

Time:4.00pm

Ground Floor Seminar Room

25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG

The Stars are the Limit: Neuromorphic Vision Processing for Astronomy

In this talk I will describe our recent work with neuromorphic image sensors for object recognition and tracking. These image sensors produce a spatiotemporal pattern of events (spikes) in asynchronous fashion. This means there is no concept of frames or exposure time in these sensors, making them very fast, and insensitive to motion blur. Each pixel in the sensor compresses the received light intensity logarithmically, and only reports an event when this signal increases (ON events) or decreases (OFF events) by a set threshold. Observing space with these cameras results in very low data rates, as most of the time little is changing. The in-pixel log compression and temporal differentiation means these sensors work over a very large dynamic range of light intensity (>130dB) without needing to change any sensor settings. As a result, imaging can be performed at night and during the day with the same set-up. However, standard computer vision processing techniques do not apply to the spatiotemporal event stream generated by the camera. Our research has therefore focussed on developing novel signal processing techniques to process the sensor output.

Biography

André van Schaik is a Research Professor in Bioelectronics and Neuroscience. He received the M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the University of Twente, Enschede, The Netherlands, in 1990 and the Ph.D. degree in electrical engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (EPFL), Lausanne, Switzerland, in 1998. In 1998 he was a postdoctoral research fellow in the Department of Physiology at the University of Sydney, funded by fellowship from the Garnett Passe and Rodney Williams memorial foundation. In 1999 he became a Senior Lecturer in the School of Electrical and Information Engineering at the University of Sydney and promoted to Reader in 2004. In 2011 André became a professor at Western Sydney University and started the Biomedical Engineering and Neuromorphic Systems Research Program in the MARCS Institute for Brain, Behaviour, and Development. His research focuses on three main areas: neuromorphic engineering, bioelectronics, and neuroscience. He was identified as a world leader in neuromorphic engineering research in May 2006 by an independent article in IEEE Spectrum, the IEEE largest circulation magazine. He has authored more than 200 publications and is an inventor of more than 35 patents. He is a founder of three start-up companies: VAST Audio, Personal Audio, and Heard Systems. He is a Fellow of the IEEE.