The effect of contrast enhancement on familiar face recognition with simulating prosthetic vision

Many research teams have studied to make the blind see by stimulating the retina cells using electrical devices. But due to the limited number of electrodes, it needs to complement low resolution with image processing. In this paper, we tried to find the effect of image processing, especially with contrast enhancement (CE) technique. We investigated face recognition performance with three different resolutions (8×8, 12×12, 16×16). Especially test images used here were facial images of subjects' familiar colleagues. Also we compared the performances with those of edge detection(ED) technique in 16×16 resolution. The results showed significant higher accuracy of face recognition with 8×8 resolution when using CE technique. Moreover accuracy with CE was much higher than that with ED.