Mitsubishi Electric Co Ltd claims to have a working ‘artificial retina’ chip that senses and processes images similarly to the human eye. Few details of the hows-and-whats were available at time of going to press, but the Japan Comline news service reports that the chip is to be included in an image processing camera, samples of which are available now. The chip conducts image search and processing in real time. A module consisting of the chip and a microcomputer can conduct real-time recognit ion of hand gestures and other body movements. Useful for programmable image processing and image retrieval, the chip is said to be faster than charge-coupled devices, and can be adapted to integration with peripheral circuits.The company is soliciting orders for the chip for controlling robots or other equipment for production line automation, and expects the chip’s use to bloom into wider multimedia applications including computer-human interaction.
