Efficient scene preparation and downscaling prior to stimulation in retinal prosthesis

Retinal prostheses are moving towards providing a return to some functional vision for those with the Retinitis Pigmentosa disease. Optoelectronic/optogenetic retinal prosthesis holds particular promise. As the various techniques are unlikely to return perfect vision in the first instance, we need to explore how best to present the visual scene. The key task is to restore mobility and scene recognition to the patients. Therefore, some form of reduction for the visual information should be applied before transfer to the retina. In particular, scene segmentation can reduce unimportant textures, thus increasing the contrast of the key features and objects. Based on the thermal characteristics of objects, in this paper we present a new processing platform to just transfer important objects segmented using mixed visible-infra red imaging. With this new segmentation approach, complex objects are still distinguishable even with low effective resolution.