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Phys.org and other sites report on a new type of camera that is extremely fast, it looks for the slope of intensity at individual pixels and at the same time requires much less bandwidth than a conventional video camera,
    https://phys.org/news/2017-02-ultrafast-camera-self-driving-vehicles-drones.html
Said to be useful for any type of real time use, in particular self-driving cars.

From the company site, http://www.hillhouse-tech.com/

Each pixel in our sensor can individually monitor the slope of change in light intensity and report an event if a threshold is reached. Row and column arbitration circuits process the pixel events and make sure only one is granted to access the output port at a time in a fairly ordered manner when they receive multiple requests simultaneously. The response time to the pixel event is at nanosecond scale. As such, the sensor can be tuned to capture motion objects with speed faster than a certain threshold. The speed of the sensor is not limited by any traditional concept such as exposure time, frame rate, etc. It can detect fast motion which is traditionally captured by expensive, high speed cameras running at tens of thousands frames per second and at the same time produces 1000x less of data.

Sounds sort of like an eye (human or animal), which has a lot of hardware (wetware?) processing directly behind the retina and only sends a relatively slow data rate to the brain.

Original Submission