Ultrafast dynamic machine vision with spatiotemporal photonic computing | Science Advances

Ultrafast dynamic machine vision in the optical domain can provide unprecedented perspectives for high-performance computing. However, owing to the limited degrees of freedom, existing photonic computing approaches rely on the memory’s slow read/write operations to implement dynamic processing. Here, we propose a spatiotemporal photonic computing architecture to match the highly parallel spatial computing with high-speed temporal computing and achieve a three-dimensional spatiotemporal plane. A unified training framework is devised to optimize the physical system and the network model. The photonic processing speed of the benchmark video dataset is increased by 40-fold on a space-multiplexed system with 35-fold fewer parameters. A wavelength-multiplexed system realizes all-optical nonlinear computing of dynamic light field with a frame time of 3.57 nanoseconds. The proposed architecture paves the way for ultrafast advanced machine vision free from the limits of memory wall and will find applications in unmanned systems, autonomous driving, ultrafast science, etc.