Video-rate simulated annealing for stochastic artificial retinas

We describe a massively parallel system that uses speckle patterns projected onto a dedicated integrated circuit to carry out simulated annealing computations at video-rate on a locally interconnected mesh of binary state variables. The integrated circuit is composed of a 24 × 24 array of processing elements, with two photodetectors for speckle detection on each element. The time-varying speckle patterns incident on the circuit act as thermal noise sources responsible for simulating the thermal equilibrium. This system is a first step towards the realization of more complex systems for performing stochastic computations in early vision.