SIMULATION OF THE RETINA: A TOOL FOR VISUAL PROSTHESES

To extract high-level information from natural scenes, the visual system has to cope with a wide variety of ambient lights, reflection properties of objects, spatio-temporal contexts, and geometrical complexity. By pre-processing the visual information, the retina plays a key role in the functioning of the whole visual system. It is crucial to reproduce such a pre-processing in artificial devices aiming at replacing or substituting the damaged vision system by artificial means. In this paper, we present a biologically plausible model of the retina at the cell level and its implementation as a real-time retinal simulation software. It features the non-uniform sampling of the visual information by the photoreceptor cells, the non-separable spatio-temporal properties of the retina, the subsequent generation of the Parvocellular and Magnocellular pathways, and the non-linear equalization of luminance and contrast at the local level. For each of these aspects, a description of the model is provided and illustr...