Optical Flow Sensor: A Direction-Selective Bionic Retina Design

arXiv:2607.28686v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Optical flow characterizes motion in the visual field and is fundamental to motion perception and tracking in biological and artificial vision systems. Biological retinas extract motion efficiently through local ON/OFF pathways and parallel processing, while conventional frame-based optical flow relies on dense sampling and global computation, resulting in high latency and power consumption. To overcome these limitations, we present a pixel-level Optical Flow Sensor (OFS) integrated circuit. The design combines Dynamic Vision Sensor (DVS) ON/OFF event comparison with time-difference measurement to enable fully parallel optical flow computation on-chip. An optical-flow-specific Address-Event Representation (OF-AER) interface supports low-power, high-throughput readout. rev{Based on the CMOS-based OFS, we further propose optical memristor-based OFS to reduce sensor power consumption and area overhead.} Experimental results show that the proposed OFS achieves a 303imes reduction in power consumption compared with FPGA-accelerated DVS systems while maintaining microsecond-level latency. Moreover, by directly outputting optical flow vectors, the OFS reduces output data size by approximately 3.3imes, demonstrating strong potential for ultra-high-speed, low-power vision sensing applications.

Source: arXiv cs.CV | 2026-08-03