Simulated Prosthetic Vision: Improving text accessibility with retinal prostheses

Grégoire Denis (1) , Christophe Jouffrais (1, 2) , Corinne Mailhes (3, 4) , Marc J.-M. Macé (1, 2)

1 IRIT-ELIPSE - Etude de L’Interaction Personne SystèmE
2 CNRS - Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique
3 IRIT-SC - Signal et Communications
4 Toulouse INP - Institut National Polytechnique (Toulouse)

Image processing can improve significantly the every-day life of blind people wearing current and upcoming retinal prostheses relying on an external camera. We propose to use a real-time text localization algorithm to improve text accessibility. An augmented text-specific rendering based on automatic text localization has been developed. It has been evaluated in comparison to the classical rendering through a Simulated Prosthetic Vision (SPV) experiment with 16 subjects. Subjects were able to detect text in natural scenes much faster and further with the augmented rendering compared to the control rendering. Our results show that current and next generation of low resolution retinal prostheses may benefit from real-time text detection algorithms.

Mots clés: Image processing; Text accessibility; Simulated prosthetic vision

Domaines: Imagerie médicale; Traitement des images [eess.IV]; Neurosciences

Grégoire Denis, Christophe Jouffrais, Corinne Mailhes, Marc J.-M. Macé. Simulated Prosthetic Vision: Improving text accessibility with retinal prostheses. IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Society Conference - EMBC 2014, Aug 2014, Chicago, United States. pp. 1719-1722. ⟨hal-01147261⟩