Effects of Depth-Based Object Isolation in Simulated Retinal Prosthetic Vision.

What is it about?

Perception through retinal prostheses is very limited, but it can be improved by applying object isolation. We used an object isolation algorithm based on integral imaging to isolate objects of interest according to their depth from the camera and applied image processing manipulation to the isolated-object images. Subsequently, we applied a spatial prosthetic vision simulation that converted the isolated-object images to phosphene images. We compared the phosphene images for two types of input images, the original image (before applying object isolation), and the isolated-object image to illustrate the effects of object isolation on simulated prosthetic vision without and with multiple spatial variations of phosphenes, such as size and shape variations, spatial shifts, and dropout rate. The results show an improvement in the perceived shape, contrast, and dynamic range (number of gray levels) of objects in the phosphene image.

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Photo by Harpreet Singh on Unsplash

Photo by Harpreet Singh on Unsplash

Why is it important?

Prosthetic vision is very limited because of the low spatial resolution and many negative spatial and temporal effects. The technique proposed in this article may help improve the quality of prosthetic vision.

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