The focus of attention under phosphenated vision through retinal implants

In this paper, we use a state of the art saliency model to compare salient locations for unprocessed colour images with those of phosphenated images. The motivation for doing so is to estimate the impact of phosphenisation of input streams as it may occur when someone is equipped with a retinal implant. We aim to determine if there is any need to preprocess images for an implant user to help them find presumably important components of an image. This will not be answered conclusively, as whether saliency is preserved or not strongly depends on the brain's ability to spatially integrate phosphenes to smooth images at different scales.