A Robust Edge Enhancement Approach for Low Vision Patients Using Scene Simplification

Patients with low vision have reduced visual acuity and a significant loss of contrast sensitivity resulting in gross blurring of the visual scene over a significant area of their field of view. This paper describes a robust approach for edge enhancement for visual impairments patients, based on simplifying the visual scene to remove unnecessary textures and then enhance the edges of the simplified image. The effectiveness of this scheme was demonstrated in a pilot study composed of three patients suffering from macular degeneration. They succeeded to identify most of the objects in the images when using our robust enhancement compared to the original images.