Granted Patent B2

US 12,323,714 · App. 18/856,549 · Granted Jun 3, 2025

Inventors: Arto Nurmikko (Providence, RI); Ning Zhang (Providence, RI)

Assignee: Brown University

H04N23/95G06N3/049H04N25/47

Abstract

Claims (14)

1. A system comprising:

a high density surface emitting laser array source, the high density surface emitting laser array source comprising a near infrared vertical cavity semiconductor laser (VCSEL) array that enables individual access to closely packed laser elements on a sub-microsecond timescale;

a detector comprising a dynamic vision sensor having low latency, high dynamic range and ultralow power; and

a chip scale neuromorphic computing platform configured to perform real-time target image reconstruction, the distinctly separate high density surface emitting laser array source, the detector and the chip scale neuromorphic computing platform integrated into a single functional whole.

2. The system of claim 1 wherein the dynamic vision camera chip detects time-varying changes in optical constants.

3. The system of claim 2 wherein the dynamic vision camera chip collects backscattered infrared light from a turbid media and records dynamic events of interest as spike data.

4. The system of claim 3 wherein the dynamic vision camera chip is temporally synchronized with pulsed emission from each VCSEL array, enabling the spike data be acquired as a matrix representation S i,j ×D k,1 , where each source/detector pixel pair represents contribution from a separate photon source channel to a full image within the dynamic vision camera chip's field of view.

5. The system of claim 4 wherein the chip scale neuromorphic computing platform comprises an asynchronous spiking neural network (SNN) for adaptive self-modifying event-driven fine-grained parallel computations used to implement learning and inference with high efficiency.

6. A neuromorphic imaging pipeline architecture comprising:

a scattering medium with dynamic targets;

laser driving circuits linked to a vertical-cavity surface-emitting laser (VCSEL) array, the VCSEL array providing photon injection into the scattering medium;

a dynamic vision sensor (DVS) camera to provide photon detection from the scattering medium, the DVS camera sending spike trains to a neuromorphic chip for data driven neuromorphic execution;

a deep spiking neural network (DSNN) for target reconstruction (image/video) on the neuromorphic chip; and

a consistent signal pipeline with only asynchronous spiking signals generated at hardware level are the data flow.

Assignments (1)

Continuity (2)

References Cited (265)