Accelerators for biologically-inspired attention and recognition

Video and image content has begun to play a growing role in many applications, ranging from video games to autonomous self-driving vehicles. In this paper, we present accelerators for gist-based scene recognition, saliency-based attention, and HMAX-based object recognition that have multiple uses and are based on the current understanding of the vision systems found in the visual cortex of the mammalian brain. By integrating them into a two-level hierarchical system, we improve recognition accuracy and reduce computational time. Results of our accelerator prototype on a multi-FPGA system show real-time performance and high recognition accuracy with large speedups over existing CPU, GPU and FPGA implementations.