A Portable Low Vision Aid based on GPU

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to describe a customizable aid system based on GPU for low vision. The system aims to transform images taken from the patient's environment and tries to convey the best information possible through his visual rest, applying various transformations to the input image and projecting the processed image on a head-mounted-display, HMD. The system easily enables implementing and testing different kinds of vision enhancements adapted to the pathologies of each low vision affected, his particular visual field, and the evolution of his disease. We have implemented several types of visual enhancements based on extracting an overlaying edges, image filtering, and contrast enhancement. We have developed a complete image processing library for GPUs compatible with CUDA in order the system can perform real time processing employing a light-weight netbook with an integrated GPU NVIDIA ION2. We briefly summarize here their computational cost (in terms of processed frames per second) for three different