In this paper, we describe the design of Neurogrid, a neuromorphic system for simulating large-scale neural models in real time. Neuromorphic systems realize the function of biological neural systems by emulating their structure. Designers of such systems face three major design choices: 1) whether to emulate the four neural elements-axonal arbor, synapse, dendritic tree, and soma-with dedicated or shared electronic circuits; 2) whether to implement these electronic circuits in an analog or digital manner; and 3) whether to interconnect arrays of these silicon neurons with a mesh or a tree network. The choices we made were: 1) we emulated all neural elements except the soma with shared electronic circuits; this choice maximized the number of synaptic connections; 2) we realized all electronic circuits except those for axonal arbors in an analog manner; this choice maximized energy efficiency; and 3) we interconnected neural arrays in a tree network; this choice maximized throughput. These three choices made it possible to simulate a million neurons with billions of synaptic connections in real time-for the first time-using 16 Neurocores integrated on a board that consumes three watts.

The classification of urban landscape in aerial lidar point clouds is useful in 3D modeling and object recognition applications in urban environments. In this paper, we introduce a multi-category classification system for identifying water, ground, roof, and trees in airborne lidar. The system is organized as a cascade of binary classifiers, each of which performs unsupervised region growing followed by supervised, segment-wise classification. Categories with the most discriminating features, such as water and ground, are identified first and are used as context for identifying more complex categories, such as trees. We use 3D shape analysis and region growing to identify ¿planar¿ and ¿scatter¿ regions that likely correspond to ground/roof and trees respectively. We demonstrate results on two urban datasets, the larger of which contains 200 million lidar returns over 7km2. We show that our ground, roof, and tree classifiers, when trained on one dataset, perform well on the other dataset.