title: Real-time simulation of large-scale neural architectures for visual features computation based on GPU.
abstract: The intrinsic parallelism of visual neural architectures based on distributed hierarchical layers is well suited to be implemented on the multi-core architectures of modern graphics cards. The design strategies that allow us to optimally take advantage of such parallelism, in order to efficiently map on GPU the hierarchy of layers and the canonical neural computations, are proposed. Speciﬁcally, the advantages of a cortical map-like representation of the data are exploited. Moreover, a GPU implementation of a novel neural architecture for the computation of binocular disparity from stereo image pairs, based on populations of binocular energy neurons, is presented. The implemented neural model achieves good performances in terms of reliability of the disparity estimates and a near real-time execution speed, thus demonstrating the effectiveness of the devised design strategies. The proposed approach is valid in general, since the neural building blocks we implemented are a common basis for the modeling of visual neural functionalities.
authors.affiliation: Department of Informatics, Bioengineering, Robotics, and Systems Engineering, University of Genoa, 16145 Genoa, Italy. manuela.chessa@unige.it
authors.forename: Manuela
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Chessa
authors.forename: Valentina
authors.initials: V
authors.lastname: Bianchi
authors.forename: Massimo
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Zampetti
authors.forename: Silvio P
authors.initials: SP
authors.lastname: Sabatini
authors.forename: Fabio
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Solari
mesh_terms: D000200:Action Potentials / Q000502:physiology; D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D003196:Computer Graphics / Q000295:instrumentation*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D003199:Computer Systems; D004867:Equipment Design; D006801:Humans; D008959:Models, Neurological; D009415:Nerve Net / Q000502:physiology*; D011381:Programming Languages; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted / Q000295:instrumentation*; D012984:Software; D015348:Vision, Binocular / Q000502:physiology*; D014793:Visual Cortex / Q000502:physiology*