Biologically inspired image sampling for electronic eye

Abstract

In biomedical field, electronic eyes are of a great interest to provide visual information to blind people. Some of them are built to be plugged to the optical nerve and others to the visual cortex itself. In our case the electronic eye processes images in order to reproduce the retina behavior, as well as some of the visual cortex abilities. The main task presented in this paper deals with data acquisition and restitution. In other words the image acquired by a classical CCD is re-sampled in order to reproduce cone acquisition. Cones are small photo-receptors located on the retina perpendicularly to the visual axis. As cones are dedicated to color perception the presented method shows how to process color data in order to obtain a radial-sampled image. In this way the amount of data decreases considerably and the image processing to be achieved later is fastened up.