title: Recognition of objects in simulated irregular phosphene maps for an epiretinal prosthesis.
abstract: Visual prostheses offer a possibility of restoring vision to the blind. It is necessary to determine minimum requirements for daily visual tasks. To investigate the recognition of common objects in daily life based on the simulated irregular phosphene maps, the effect of four parameters (resolution, distortion, dropout percentage, and gray scale) on object recognition was investigated. The results showed that object recognition accuracy significantly increased with an increase of resolution. Distortion and dropout percentage had significant impact on the object recognition; with the increase of distortion level and dropout percentage, the recognition decreased considerably. The accuracy decreased significantly only at gray level 2, whereas the other three gray levels showed no obvious difference. The two image processing methods (merging pixels to lower the resolution and edge extraction before lowering resolution) showed significant difference on the object recognition when there was a high degree of distortion level or dot dropout.
authors.affiliation: School of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai, China.
authors.forename: Yanyu
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.forename: Jing
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Hao
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Wu
authors.forename: Liming
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Xun
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Cao
authors.forename: Xinyu
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Chai
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D006801:Humans; D010364:Pattern Recognition, Visual; D010719:Phosphenes; D010775:Photic Stimulation; D014792:Visual Acuity / Q000502:physiology*; D057488:Visual Prosthesis; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Irregular phosphene map; Object recognition; Pixelized image; Simulated prosthetic vision; Visual prosthesis