A wearable real-time image processor for a vision prosthesis

  • Authors:

  • D. Tsai;J. W. Morley;G. J. Suaning;N. H. Lovell

  • Affiliations:

  • Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia;School of Medicine, University of Western Sydney, Sydney, NSW 1797, Australia and School of Medical Sciences, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia;Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia;Graduate School of Biomedical Engineering, University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW 2052, Australia

  • Venue:
  • Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine
  • Year:
  • 2009

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Abstract

Rapid progress in recent years has made implantable retinal prostheses a promising therapeutic option in the near future for patients with macular degeneration or retinitis pigmentosa. Yet little work on devices that encode visual images into electrical stimuli have been reported to date. This paper presents a wearable image processor for use as the external module of a vision prosthesis. It is based on a dual-core microprocessor architecture and runs the Linux operating system. A set of image-processing algorithms executes on the digital signal processor of the device, which may be controlled remotely via a standard desktop computer. The results indicate that a highly flexible and configurable image processor can be built with the dual-core architecture. Depending on the image-processing requirements, general-purpose embedded microprocessors alone may be inadequate for implementing image-processing strategies required by retinal prostheses.