Bionic Eye Design and Vision

Background, Motivation and Research Goals

Through a collaboration with National ICT Australia Victoria Research Laboratory, we are involved in the development of a bionic eye to aid the visually impaired. A primary cause of severe visual impairment is macular degeneration. This occurs when there is damage to the macula part of the retina that lies at the back of the eye. The retina is responsible for changing light stimulus to electrical signals that nerves pass onto the brain. A bionic eye implant could bypass the diseased cells in the retina and electrically stimulate the remaining viable nerve cells. This would require a computer chip that sits in the back of the individual's eye, linked up to a mini video camera built into glasses that they wear. Images captured by the camera would be transmitted to the chip, which would in turn convert them to electrical stimulus that the brain can interpret.

The visual system is the most studied part of the brain. Many low level visual mechanisms have been characterised to the "first order", and higher level, more cognitive, visual processes are also well studied. The visual system has two primary goals: first to see and recognize objects in the three-dimensional (3D) spatial environment, and second help the individual to navigate around, and interact with, objects within the environment. Object recognition depends on interactions between memory systems and the visual system, whereas navigation depends on the interaction between the visual system and the sensorimotor system in charge of controlling the limbs.

Given that vision is so well studied, it is probably the best sensory modality for which high level cognitive processes can be most realistically simulated by mathematical models. Thus it is  also the best sensory modality within which one can study neuromodulation of sensory processing, as a means to understand neural processes during different states of consciousness (e.g. asleep vs awake).

Our research goals are to understand, develop models for and understand signal processing of signals generated by the visual system. Our group has interests in many aspects of vision including color vision, depth perception, image segmentation, object recognition, object tracking, motion detection and navigation. We are interested in approaching the modeling of these processes from both neural and vision perspectives.

We are also interested in doing/supervising projects involving neural modeling of biological visual systems, and applying an understanding of biological vision to machine vision applications such as object recognition or visual navigation.

More Information

You can find details about research into vision and bionic eye design here:

• People: for a list of our members and collaborators involved in this area.
• Research Projects: for details about current research projects related to vision and bionic eye design.
• Publications: for a current list of publications related to vision and bionic eye design.
• Related links: for more information related to vision and bionic eye design.

Getting Involved

Contact us if you are interested in getting involved with us in this research area.

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