Real-time implementation of an optophone

Can humans learn to see without using their eyes, and can sound be used as the medium for the visual information? This is the idea behind the “optophone”. An important point to emphasise is that the sounds that are being proposed for use in the optophone are those in the normal audible range of a human and not high-frequency sounds such as those used by bats for echo-location. The optophone is not an echo-locator; it is a device that converts images from a camera into audible sounds. The idea of an optophone raises two questions. (1) Can information in an image be converted into information in sounds? (2) Can humans learn to interpret these sounds? If the answer to both of these questions is “yes” then clearly the optophone could be a useful aid to the blind. The work that is reported in this paper describes the attempts to answer the first question, based mainly on the work of A.R. O´Hea (1987, 1994)