Bio‐Inspired Wide‐Field Visual Neuron Implemented with Ultra‐Low Information Loss Population Coding

Abstract

Modern neuromorphic systems face critical bottlenecks in emulating biological vision, particularly in reconciling wide‐spectrum perception, distortion‐free encoding, and population‐level signal processing. Drawing inspiration from the stochastic‐resilient population coding of macaque visual neurons, an advanced visual neuron prototype is developed that incorporates photoelectric multi‐stimulation field‐effect transistor and innovative parallel threshold‐switch architecture. The visual neuron integrates broadband photodetection (350–1000 nm) with biomimetic spike population encoding in a monolithic architecture. The photosensitive MoSe2/MoS2 heterojunction region in field‐effect transistor extends the visual perception field from UV to infrared wavelengths (350–700 nm to 350–1000 nm), doubling the original field. Meanwhile, under the same conditions, the photocurrent response achieves a 1.36‐fold increase from 0.109 to 0.148 A (W cm−2)−1. The parallel threshold‐switching design transforms single‐unit encoding into cooperative population coding, achieving an 82.1% reduction rate in signal distortion. When deployed in a spiking neural network, this population‐coding paradigm demonstrates high accuracy in pattern recognition, surpassing single neuron architectures by 12.1%, while maintaining the information processing time at the biological scale (<200 ms). By unifying van der Waals heterostructure photonics with macaque‐derived neural population coding principles, this work establishes a transformative framework for bioinspired vision hardware, bridging the critical gap between neuromorphic materials and cortical processing efficiency.