Sensing super-position: visual instrument sensor replacement

The coming decade of fast, cheap and miniaturized electronics and sensory devices opens new pathways for the development of sophisticated equipment to overcome limitations of the human senses. This project addresses the technical feasibility of augmenting human vision through sensing super-position using a visual instrument sensory organ replacement (VISOR). The current implementation of the VISOR device translates visual and other passive or active sensory instruments into sounds, which become relevant when the visual resolution is insufficient for very difficult and particular sensing tasks. The sensing super-position device increases the image resolution perception and is obtained via an auditory representation as well as the visual representation. Auditory mapping is performed to distribute an image in time. The three-dimensional spatial brightness and multi-spectral maps of a sensed image are processed using real-time image processing techniques (e.g., histogram normalization) and transformed into a two-dimensional map of an audio signal as a function of frequency and time. This paper details the approach of developing sensing super-position systems as a way to augment the human vision system by exploiting the capabilities of the human hearing system as an additional neural input. The human hearing system is capable of learning to process and interpret extremely complicated and rapidly changing auditory patterns. The known capabilities of the human hearing system to learn and understand complicated auditory patterns provided the basic motivation for developing an image-to-sound mapping system