Thesis

All Work related to my MS Thesis

May - June 2021

• Initial idea to work with the biomimetic eye model
• Incorporate it into the final project for CS 275 - Artificial Life - Demetri Terzpoulos
  • code here
• Goal was to create a dog model that could see a bone being thrown and then go find it
  • Used Unity
  • I worked on the retina model, which casts rays into the scene in a log-polar distribution
  • It takes in color from the objects hit by the rays, which is used to form the optic nerve vector, or ONV

June - August 2021

• code
• I didn't have access to a Windows machine at the time to set up/run the biomimetic eye model
  • was told that it was outdated, hard to use, etc.
  • so I tried to make my own model with a modern graphics library
• Open3d was the library of choice
• I created a pinhole approximation of an eye
  • the scene simply has a white ball on a black background, and it moves around
  • rays are cast through the pinhole into the scene to get an ONV as input
  • trained neural networks in Google Colab to output the angles that the ball moved

August - September 2021

• [code]
• received code from Masaki for the locally connected networks used in Arjun's thesis
• got that set up and tried to train it on data collected from my Open3d scene
• looked into SNN libraries
  • started with NengoDL, then found snnTorch

September - October 2021

• [code]
• got a Windows machine from the lab (yay!)
• was finally able to try compiling the siggraph eye demo
  • wasted about two weeks on this before I realized that I needed to download Visual Studio 10
    • you actually can't download it anymore, so maybe I'll host the downloader somewhere
  • I was re-compiling libraries and a lot of other stuff to deal with weird compiler errors
• once I got the eye working I got more familiar with the code and collecting training data

October - December 2021

• code, code
• after getting another machine from the lab (this time with a GPU), I started training my SNNs
• I also had to find a way to connect my Python code to the VS10 project
  • libraries exist, but the eye code was just too old
  • I had to compile my code into an exe and then call that from the eye project
    • pyinstaller is a great library for this