This repository contains a recent (2023) working version of the VirtualRetina Simulator1. It includes a number of bug fixes by Jacob Huth and others. A version of the repository is also provided by the original author Adrien Wohrer.
Virtual Retina was originally developed in 2009 at INRIA, under INRIA CeCill C open-source licence. The current official website of the simulator is: https://team.inria.fr/biovision/virtualretina/, where more information and test sequences can be found (but not necessarily up-to-date).
The bugs fixed:
- when loading a configuration with
<units>already specified, the attributes of the spiking channel are not transferred to the units- fixed with commit d3cdcad
- while random positioning was implemented, there was no xml attribute to set positional noise
!= 0- fixed with commit d3cdcad
- the saveMap command line option did not save the values of the attenuation signal
- fixed with commit 0c839cd
- CImg is now downloaded from their github repository
- fixed with commit cb13f4b
- removed deprecated function call commit f56ba20
- xmlParameters had clashing template names, leading to compiler warnings
- fixed with commit 5f9d076 by Richard Veale
- minor modifications to comply to new compiler requests (2023)
- inclusion of library
Mvaspikein the git source code.Mvaspikeis an event-driven spiking neural network simulator that was originally developed by Olivier Rochel at INRIA. It is now directly included in the VirtualRetina archive, as it cannot be found online anymore.
Contributors to this project are:
- Adrien Wohrer - original author
- Emilie Mayer
- Jacob Huth
- Richard Veale
Tested on Ubuntu 14.04, 16.04, 17.04 and Debian 11.
- Install requirements
One of the dependencies requires headers for xml libraries: libxml2-dev and libx11-dev
It might be possible that cmake can be installed automatically, but it is recommended to
install the latest version via your package manager.
For Ubuntu run:
sudo apt-get install cmake libxml2-dev libx11-dev
- Download and Compile
Clone the repository to a folder of your choice
git clone https://github.com/jahuth/virtualretina
Run the script download_build_all.bash (using bash)
cd virtualretina
bash download_build_all.bash
This script will download multiple software projects and compile them one after another. If you encounter an error, please file an issue.
*************************************************************************
************ Welcome to VirtualRetina *****************
************ version 2.2.3 *****************
*************************************************************************
Spiking, large-scale retina simulation software.
Author : Adrien Wohrer
Institution : Université Clermont Auvergne
Contact : [email protected]
Project started December 2004.
Version 2.2.3 : December 2023.
This is the retina package. It contains VirtualRetina/, as well as other
libraries required by the software, that you may want to install.
Read
VirtualRetina/tutorial.pdf
for intructions.
Type " bash download_build_all.bash " for an automatic installation
of the library, which will:
1) Download external libraries MvaSpike and CImg and install them locally,
plus home-made library xmlParameters++, in directory External_Libraries/
2) Compile VirtualRetina.
Once the package is compiled it can be tested by running:
VirtualRetina/bin/Retina -ret test/retina_files/EXAMPLE_primate_ParvoMagno.xml test/sequences/walking_finland/finland.10* -r 8 -nS 8
And to reconstruct the video:
VirtualRetina/bin/ReconstructRetina -i tmp/simulation.txt -ch 1 0 -f 2 -w 3 -o tmp/last_reconstruction.inr
VirtualRetina/bin/viewVideo tmp/last_reconstruction.inr -s 20
See tutorial.pdf for more examples.
1: Wohrer, A., & Kornprobst, P. (2009). Virtual Retina: a biological retina model and simulator, with contrast gain control. Journal of Computational Neuroscience, 26(2), 219–49. http://doi.org/10.1007/s10827-008-0108-4