CAVIAR project resources

(go to resources)

CAVIAR (the coordinator's site) is a European Commission funded project to develop a multichip vision system based on Address-Event Representation (AER) communication of spike events.

Our partners in CAVIAR are

• the group of Bernabe Linares-Barranco (the project coordinator) at the Institute of Microelectronics in Sevilla,
• the group of Anton Civit at the University of Sevilla, and
• the group of Phillip Hafliger at the University of Oslo.

Shih-Chii Liu is leading INI's part of CAVIAR and works on the object chip part of the system with her student, Matthias Oster.

My student Patrick Lichtsteiner and I took over the late Jorg Kramer's part of the project, which is the developement of a dynamic vision sensor AER silicon retina.

CAVIAR components emulate parts of biological visual pathways. They compute on incoming spikes and provide outgoing spikes. Cells are connected by asynchronous digital buses carrying their spike addresses using the Addresss-Event Representation (AER).

A working CAVIAR prototype asssembled in April 2005 at the CAVIAR workshop at the INI looked like this

Our characterization from the April 2005 workshop showed that stimuli of two different shapes on a rotating disk could simultaneously be discriminated and their position extracted at level of the object chip. Two convolutions chips were used, one with a large circular kernel, the other with a small circular kernel. The object chip (2-d WTA) cleaned up the convolution results and indicated at the moment the snapshot below was taken that the larger scale was winning.

From Feb 2006 at the latest workshop in Sevilla, you can play a Flash video (~10MB) showing some of the accomplishments. This video emphasizes the novel developement of a sensory-motor system using CAVIAR components. Another accomplishement was the use of a generic monitor/sequencer board to capture on one computer using multiple USB interfaces all the timestamped events from all 37,000 neurons in the entire system and to render these in real time.

Resources

Some resources for CAVIAR project members:

• Help for setting up software USB1/2 AE monitoring/display, post Sevilla workshop Feb 2006
• Help for the original SimpleMonitorUSBXPress board, including software downloads, user guide, design PCBs, firmware, etc..
• Poster prepared by Tobi Delbruck and presented at NIPS 2005 meeting by Tobi Delbruck, Matthias Oster, and Shih-Chii Liu
• Poster prepared by Tobi Delbruck for Brussels review meeting 1 Dec 2003

The partners have individually or collaboratively written many papers about work done on aspects of CAVIAR. So far we have only written a single collective paper on the entire project, accepted to the NIPS 2005 meeting:

• R. Serrano-Gotarredona, et al., "AER Building Blocks for Multi-Layer Multi-Chip Neuromorphic Vision Systems," in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 18, Vancouver, 2005, pp. 1217-1224.

From Spring 2005 at the INI during one of the CAVIAR assembly get-togethers.

Top row: Patrick Lichtsteiner, Tobi Delbruck, Paco Gomez-Rodriquez, Raphael Serrano-Gottoaradeno, Phillip Hafliger
Bottom row: Matthias Oster, Raphael Paz-Vicente, Shih-Chii Liu