Abstract
Visual prostheses are devices to recover visual sense by means of electrical stimulation to the visual nervous system. Although the ultimate goal is to restore excellent human visual function, presently it is aimed to realize the minimal visual function in order to carry out specific tasks in our daily livers. The purpose of this study is to determine specifications of the visual prosthesis which can realize the above function. In this study we have developed a simulator which enables us to experience prosthetic vision using real-time image processing. Here we selected “reading” as one of the most typical tasks in our daily lives, and quantitatively estimated reading ability with the simulated prosthetic vision. We used the MNREAD, a commonly-used reading ability test. As a result, it was observed that the range from 4 to 8 was appropriate as a gray level. In addition, it was suggested that the size of a pixel affected the reading performance, though it was less influential than the gray level.
