A Retinomorphic Optical Spiking Neuron for Camouflaged Object Detection

Advanced vision systems require retinomorphic, energy-efficient spike-based preprocessing of dynamic visual scenes. Here, we demonstrate multiple retinal preprocessing functionalities by leveraging a Hodgkin-Huxley-based optical spiking neuron (OSHN) that incorporates a two-dimensional anti-ambipolar phototransistor operated in the subthreshold regime to minimize power consumption. OSHN exhibits wavelength- and intensity-sensitive spike encoding with energy consumption per spike of 0.9 pJ under dark, 2 pJ at 480 nm (mid wavelength, M), and 24.5 pJ at 800 nm (long wavelength, L). The low (biological)-to-high spiking rate (0 - 2 kHz) with substantially faster response times (4.2 μs - 1.25 ms) than the human retina (30 ms - 60 ms), reveal OSHN's fast decision-making capability. OSHN facilitates concurrent spectral-spatial processing by emulating retinal antagonistic center-surround receptive fields (CSRFs) at a single wavelength (480 nm or 800 nm) with varying intensities, visual adaptation (at 480 nm) to prevent system saturation, and L-M cone opponency in midget ganglion cells. Finally, a CSRF-augmented spiking neural network (SNN) has been developed for camouflaged object detection, achieving 4.4%, 10.4%, and 28.4% improvements in accuracy over conventional SNN on FMNIST, COD10K, and synthetic camouflaged datasets, outperforming existing photoactive spiking architectures while enabling event-driven intelligent edge vision systems.