A neuromorphic vision system for open-world visual intelligence

Abstract

Time-efficient and robust visual intelligence remains a critical challenge in unstructured open-world environments, yet current approaches often rely on computationally intensive neural architectures or task-specific sensors with limited versatility. Inspired by biological vision and information bottleneck theory, we report a neuromorphic vision system that performs task-oriented visual intelligence through an information distillation strategy (named as task traction mechanism) implemented on hardware. The system integrates a polarization-sensitive imager with a resistive random-access memory (RRAM) array to progressively distill task-relevant information via light field selection, region of interest extraction, and target anticipation. The neuromorphic vision system conducts visual tasks within an execution time of 193 μs. Evaluation across eight challenging open-world scenarios shows accuracy improvements of 25.54%, 37.73%, and 36.10% for object tracking, object segmentation, and trajectory prediction, respectively, together with an average 30.6-fold reduction in latency relative to state-of-the-art solutions.