A Synthetic Vision System Using Directionally Selective Motion Detectors to Recognize Collision

: Reliably recognizing objects approaching on a collision course is extremely important. In this paper, a synthetic vision system is proposed to tackle the problem of collision recognition in dynamic environments. The synthetic vision system combines the outputs of four whole-field motion-detecting neurons each receiving inputs from a network of neurons employing asymmetric lateral inhibition to suppress their responses to one direction of motion. An evolutionary algorithm is then used to adjust the weights between the four motion-detecting neurons to tune the system to detect collisions in two test environments. To do this a population of agents each representing a proposed synthetic visual system were either shown images generated by a mobile Khepera robot navigating in a simplified laboratory environment or were shown images videoed outdoors from a moving vehicle. The agents had to cope with the local environment correctly in order to survive. After 400 generations, the best agent r...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: ALIFE
• Authors: Shigang Yue, F. Claire Rind
• Keywords: ALIFE 2007, Asymmetric Lateral Inhibition, Collision, Modeling And Simulation, Synthetic Vision System