Moving object detection and background enhancement for thalamic visual prostheses

Visual prostheses open the door of hope to restore functional vision for the blind. One of the main challenges facing their development is the limited number of electrodes used in the stimulation process which limits the resolution of the perceived images. To improve the perception, the useful features in the scene need to be enhanced while the other features should be suppressed to achieve better resolution. This paper introduces an image processing method to enhance three main features detectable by the natural visual pathway; namely the contrast, the motion and the edges. It then reduces the size of the image into an activity matrix used to generate the electric stimulation for the electrodes array. We compared the proposed method to four other image processing strategies in terms of the quality of the resulting image in addition to the perceived image using a simulation of prosthetic vision. Results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms the other techniques in both aspects.