An embedded high performance data acquisition and pre-processing interface for asynchronous event-based Silicon Retina data

In this paper we present an embedded high performance Serial RapidIO™ data acquisition interface for Silicon Retina technology based computer vision applications. The Silicon Retina technology is a new kind of bio-inspired analogue sensor that provides only event-triggered information depending on variations of intensity in a scene. Unaltered parts of a scene without intensity variations need neither be transmitted nor processed. Due to the asynchronous behavior and the varying data-rates up to a peak of 6M events per second (Meps) per channel and a time resolution of 10ns of the imager, a distributed digital signal processing system using both a single-core and a multi-core fixed-point digital signal processor (DSP) is used. The single-core DSP is used for data pre-processing of the compressed data streams and forwarding it to the multi-core DSP, which processes the actual data. Pre-processing also includes disposing the data required for processing on the multi-core system using a data parallelism concept. We discuss both design considerations, and implementation details of the interface and the pre-processing algorithm.