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Section: Software

Virtual Retina: A Large-Scale Simulator of Biological Retina

Participants : Bruno Cessac, Hassan Nasser, Pierre Kornprobst [correspondent] , Adrien Wohrer [Group for Neural Theory - ENS] .

Virtual Retina is a simulation software developped by Adrien Wohrer during his PhD  [74] , [73] that allows large-scale simulations of biologically-plausible retinas.

Virtual Retina has a variety of biological features implemented such as (i) spatio-temporal linear filter implementing the basic center/surround organization of retinal filtering, (ii) non-linear contrast gain control mechanism providing instantaneous adaptation to the local level of contrast; (iii) spike generation by one or several layers of ganglion cells paving the visual field.

Virtual Retina is under INRIA CeCill C open-source licence, so that one can download it, install it and run it on your own sequences. Virtual Retina also offers a web service (v 2.1), so that you may test directly the main software on user's own data, without any installation. This webservice was developed in collaboration with Nicolas Debeissat (engineer, 2002).

Virtual Retina continues it evolution thanks to the work done in our team by Bruno Cessac and Hassan Nasser who are interested in the analysis of the collective behavior of ganglion cells responses (see Section  6.1.1 ). To take this collective behavior into account, Virtual Retina needs to be extended since in its current version, ganglion cells are independent. Other evolutions of Virtual Retina are also investigated by external partners (see, e.g., [68] .