Image Compression and Resizing for Retinal Implant in Bionic Eye

Abstract

One field where computer-related Image processing technology showsgreat promise for the future is bionic implants such as Cochlearimplants, Retinal implants etc.. Retinal implants are being developedaround the world in hopes of restoring useful vision for patientssuffering from certain types of diseases like Age-related MacularDegeneration (AMD) and Retinitis Pigmentosa (RP). In these diseasesthe photoreceptor cells slowly degenerated, leading to blindness.However, many of the inner retinal neurons that transmit signalsfrom the photoreceptors to the brain are preserved to a large extentfor a prolonged period of time. The Retinal Prosthesis aims to providepartial vision by electrically activating the remaining cells ofthe retina. The Epi retinal prosthesis system is composed of twounits, extra ocular unit and intraocular implant. The two units areconnected by a telemetric inductive link. The Extraocular unit consistsof a CCD camera, an image processor, an encoder, and a transmitterbuilt on the eyeglass. High-resolution image from a CCD camera isreduced to lower resolution matching the array of electrodes by imageprocessor, which is then encoded into bit stream. Each electrodein an implant corresponds to one pixel in an image. The bit streamis modulated on a 22 MHz carrier and then transmitted wirelesslyto the inside implant. This paper mainly discusses two approachesin image processing which reduces the size of the image without lossof the object detection rate to that of the original image. One isabout the related image processing algorithms include image resizing,color erasing, edge enhancement and edge detection. Second one isto generate the saliency map for an image. Keywords- Epiretinal implant,AMD, RP, Extraocular and Intraocular I.