Insect Techniques for High Dynamic Range Video

Researchers at Adelaide University, Australia are developing Image Processing techniques that replicate the vision system of flies.

From the article:

"...conducting experiments that involved recording the activity of fly brain cells as they were shown different images. 'We were amazed at the extra detail they were able to extract from the dark parts of a scene. This led us to test exactly how they were able to do this and to reproduce the processing in electrical circuits and computer simulations.' Unlike a camera, flies and other animals can tune their eyes to the light levels of different regions of an image independently. 'In nature, the individual cells of the eye adjust to a part of the image independently in order to capture the maximum amount of information about the scene..."
Example Video (MP4)

While the results from the video look promising, I was unable to find any papers on this work, so I am a little hesitant to claim this work as novel. It seems to fall easily under the umbrella of High Dynamic Range Imaging (HDRI). Paul Debevec has done a large amount of work in this area already. If you are interested, He has posted a nice collection of papers and links here.