Artificial electronic retina can recognize handwritten numbers

Neuromorphic vision sensors have been extremely beneficial in developing energy-efficient intelligent systems for robotics and privacy-preserving security applications. There is an extreme need for devices to mimic the retina's photoreceptors that encode the light illumination into a sequence of spikes to develop such sensors. KAUST researchers have built an artificial electronic retina that can "see" in a similar way to the human vision system and can recognize handwritten digits. They have designed and fabricated an array of perovskite-based flexible photoreceptors that detect the visible light intensity via a change in electrical capacitance, mimicking the behavior of the eye's rod retina cells. Perovskite is very efficient at absorbing light and is already of great interest in solar cell research, while terpolymer has a high dielectric constant.