Hardware Acceleration for Neuromorphic Vision Algorithms

Neuromorphic vision algorithms are biologically inspired models that follow the processing that takes place in the primate visual cortex. Despite their efficiency and robustness, the complexity of these algorithms results in reduced performance when executed on general purpose processors. This paper proposes an application-specific system for accelerating a neuromorphic vision system for object recognition. The system is based on HMAX, a biologicallyinspired model of the visual cortex. The neuromorphic accelerators are validated on a multi-FPGA system. Results show that the neuromorphic accelerators are 13.8X (2.6X) more power efficient when compared to CPU (GPU)