We present an investigation into adopting a model of the retino-cortical mapping, found in biological visual systems, to improve the efficiency of image analysis using Deep Convolutional Neural Nets (DCNNs) in the context of robot vision and egocentric perception systems. This work has now enabled DCNNs to process input images approaching one million pixels in size, in real time , using only consumer grade graphics processor (GPU) hardware in a single pass of the DCNN .

We present ongoing work to harness biological approaches to achieving highly efficient egocentric perception by combining the spacevariant imaging architecture of the mammalian retina with Deep Learning methods. By pre-processing images collected by means of eye-tracking glasses to control the fixation locations of a software retina model, we demonstrate that we can reduce the input to a DCNN by a factor of 3, reduce the required number of training epochs and obtain over 98% classification rates when training and validating the system on a database of over 26,000 images of 9 object classes.