Going beyond vision to improve bionic vision

Abstract

Currently, most implanted visual prosthetic systems generate vision by translating sensor data from a headworn camera into electrical stimulation of the human vision system. Unfortunately, the resulting bionic vision has low spatial resolution and limited dynamic range. This dramatically reduces the usefulness of bionic vision in many real world scenarios. Historically, this problem is treated as immutable pathology. Recently, image processing has been proposed as a potential remedy to improve the useability of bionic vision. We explore another alternative: Combining multiple sensing modalities and robotic sensing algorithms. This paper gives a top level summary of ongoing research exploring this alternative.