Emulation of retinal cell responses during fixational eye movements

Abstract

In this paper, a real-time simulation of neural activities of the retinal circuits during fixational eye movements is presented. The fixational eye movements were emulated using a digital logic circuit implemented on a field-programmable gate array (FPGA) chip and installed on a previously designed retina emulator that consists of 96 × 96 pixels of photodiodes with double-layered resistive networks and a digital computer. The emulated eye movements well reproduced the temporal properties of the drift component of fixational eye movements. The system developed in the present study can emulate retinal responses to natural scenes during fixational eye movements, and it can be used to realistically and effectively analyze the visual functions of the retina.