Transforming of images information to the implant part of retinal prosthesis, by converting of images to bit formats

Much recent research attention has focused on providing a vision substitute to blind people through electrical stimulation of a component of the visual system. This approach is referred to as “visual prosthesis”. The device consists of an extra ocular and an intraocular unit. The implantable component receives power and a data signal via a telemetric inductive link between the two units. The extra ocular unit includes a video camera and video processing board and a telemetry protocol encoder chip. The intraocular unit consists of a retinal chip with a telemetry protocol decoder, a stimulus signal generator, and an electrode array. Yet little work on devices that encode visual images into electrical stimuli have been reported to date. In this paper we focus on the information that should be transformed to the stimulator of electrodes. The idea is to transfer image information to the implant unit, in a “bit by bit” fashion.