SPV experiments for a retinal visual prosthesis: Introducing a new feature: “blinking”

Researchers in the field of visual prostheses need a Simulated Prosthetic Vision (SPV) setup to evaluate their image processing algorithms on people with normal vision before implanting any retinal prostheses. In this paper, an SPV developed for a visual prosthesis is introduced and the associated experimental results are reported. These experiments are designed to examine the efficacy of two down sampling methods, the mode down sampling (MDS) and the nearest neighbor method. The experiments are conducted in a corridor including some obstacles. Three levels of difficulties are considered for each of the two methods and two measures are used to compare the efficiency of the methods: Percentage of Preferred Walking Speed (PPWS), and Total Hit Count (THC). The qualitative and quantitative results reported in this paper reveal that the controlled blinking of phosphenes would present additional information to help the patients.