A stimulus pattern extraction algorithm based on saliency map for a 625-channel retinal prosthesis system

Electronic retinal prosthesis system has been developed to restore some vision for the blinds who lose their vision due to kind of retinal diseases. The image processing of retinal prosthesis system converts the original images from the camera to the stimulus pattern that can be properly interpreted by the brain. Practically, the original images are with much high resolution (256×256) than that of the stimulus pattern (such as 25×25), which causes a technical challenge to extract the stimulus pattern from the original image. In this paper, we focus on developing an efficient stimulus pattern extraction algorithm by using the single cue saliency map, where the salient objects in the image with an optimal trimming threshold are extracted. Experimental results show that the proposed stimulus pattern extraction algorithm performs quite well for different scenes in terms of the perception of the stimulus pattern. Some suggestions are also given on trimming threshold selection for different scenes.