Intelligent automobile machine vision with smart pixels

Automobile machine vision is a potential application for hardware neural networks. This paper suggests a future system concept which combines front-end low-level processing in smart pixels and a massively interconnected optical neural network. Two smart pixels devices fabricated in Ferroelectric Liquid Crystal on Silicon technology will be described. The first device implements an array of somas, while the second device implements an array of synapses. These are effectively generic building blocks for scalable neural network architectures. Experiments have demonstrated actions of optoelectronic neurons formed by the smart pixels. An optical neural network system has been investigated in a simulation of an autoassociative memory for road sign recognition.