Neuromorphic Decoding and Dynamical Image Reconstruction from Populations of Spiking Retinal Ganglion Cells

Decoding visual stimuli from the spiking activity of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs) informs both our understanding of the retinal code and the design of visual prostheses. Natural vision is dynamic, yet state-of-the-art decoders mostly reconstruct single frames with artificial neural networks that process dense, continuous-valued signals rather than the retina's sparse, asynchronous spikes. We asked whether dynamic scenes can be reconstructed and tracked entirely within the spike domain, and at what computational cost. We built an end-to-end spiking neural network (SNN) whose neurons integrate the recorded RGC spikes over time. Populations of up to 1836 RGCs were recorded ex vivo from mouse retina on high-density microelectrode arrays while flashed images, moving bars, drifting gratings and randomly moving handwritten digits were presented. For moving digits, one shared spiking encoder fed two readouts, one reconstructing the image and one decoding the digit's position. Compute energy was estimated from counted synaptic operations. The SNN decoded what and where at once. It reconstructed the stimuli with a structural similarity (SSIM) of up to 0.93, refining the reconstruction as spikes accumulated, and tracked a randomly moving target with a mean error of 1.33 pixels on a 32×32 grid. Its fidelity nearly matched that of the best of 17 larger spiking and artificial decoders (5.9 million to 1.7 billion parameters, versus 5.4 million), and at a mean firing rate of 14.2% it needed an estimated ~70-fold less compute energy than a dense artificial network of the same architecture. Dynamic visual scenes can thus be decoded from retinal population activity in the spike domain, with a compact network and at a compute cost compatible with implantable and wearable neural interfaces, supporting spike-native decoders for visual prostheses.