Recognition of Similar Objects Using Simulated Prosthetic Vision

Due to the limitations of existing techniques, even the most advanced visual prostheses, using several hundred electrodes to transmit signals to the visual pathway, restrict sensory function and visual information. To identify the bottlenecks and guide prosthesis designing, psychophysics simulations of a visual prosthesis in normally sighted individuals are desirable. In this study, psychophysical experiments of discriminating objects with similar profiles were used to test the effects of phosphene array parameters (spatial resolution, gray scale, distortion, and dropout rate) on visual information using simulated prosthetic vision. The results showed that the increase in spatial resolution and number of gray levels and the decrease in phosphene distortion and dropout rate improved recognition performance, and the accuracy is 78.5% under the optimum condition (resolution: 32x32, gray level: 8, distortion: k=0, dropout: 0%). In combined parameter tests, significant facial recognition accuracy was achieved for all the images with k=0.1 distortion and 10% dropout. Compared with other experiments, we find that different objects do not show specific sensitivity to the changes of parameters and visual information is not nearly enough even under the optimum condition. The results suggests that higher spatial resolution and more gray levels are required for visual prosthetic devices and further research on image processing strategies to improve prosthetic vision is necessary, especially when the wearers have to accomplish more than simple visual tasks.