| Musca domestica has a very intriguing visual system and has been studied for decades. The Wyoming Information, Signal Processing, and Robotics (WISPR) Lab is particularly interested in its small brain and exquisite capability to process visual information in real-time, with the use of little to no memory. The following will explain in detail the housefly's ability to extract high-resolution information from the world around it, in order to detect edges and process motion. This thesis describes the implementation of edge detection and motion processing in a software model that mimics the housefly at the cartridge level. Both a symmetric, hexagonally-oriented cartridge and an asymmetric cartridge that more closely resembles the fly's geometry are tested. The outputted signals from the model are analyzed and compared to the biological signals collected by electrophysiological studies of the fly. This analysis is another step closer to a comprehensive model of the fly's visual system that the will aid in the WISPR lab's future development of physical sensors. Additionally, confirmation of the optical setup in the electrophysiological process is shown by developing a ZEMAX model of the optical configuration used in Musca recordings. This is important because recordings collected in earlier studies in this lab provide a basis of comparison for much of the work done in this thesis. |
