Microbead-induced OHT mice carry dysfunctional aqueous outflow facility and therefore offer a unique model that allows selective screening of aqueous production suppressant antiglaucoma drugs or for studying the mechanisms regulating aqueous humor production. Our data set the stage for using GCC thickness assessed by SD-OCT as an imaging biomarker for noninvasive tracking of neuronal benefits of glaucoma therapy in this model.

Although performance improvement with the device for the larger search area was obvious, whether it was helpful for the smaller search area depended on VF and gaze speed. Because improvement in directness was demonstrated, increased gaze speed, which could result from further training and adaptation to the device, might enable patients with small VFs to benefit from the device for visual search tasks.

Both visually salient and top-down information are important in eye movement control, but their relative roles in the planning of daily saccades are unclear. We investigated the effect of peripheral vision loss on saccadic behaviors in patients with tunnel vision (visual field diameters 7°–16°) in visual search and real-world walking experiments. The patients made up to two saccades per second to their pre-saccadic blind areas, about half of which had no overlap between the post- and pre-saccadic views. In the visual search experiment, visual field size and the background (blank or picture) did not affect the saccade sizes and direction of patients (n=9). In the walking experiment, the patients (n=5) and normal controls (n=3) had similar distributions of saccade sizes and directions. These findings might provide a clue about the extent of the top-down mechanism influence on eye movement control.

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Enhancement of non-uniformly illuminated images often suffers from over-enhancement and produces unnatural results. This paper presents a naturalness preserved enhancement method for non-uniformly illuminated images, using multi-layer lightness statistics acquired from high-quality images. Our work makes three important contributions: designing a novel multi-layer image enhancement model; deriving the multi-layer lightness statistics of high-quality outdoor images, which are incorporated into the multi-layer enhancement model; and showing that the overall quality rating of enhanced images is consistent with a combination of contrast enhancement and naturalness preservation. Two separate human observer evaluation studies were conducted on naturalness preservation and overall image quality. The results showed the proposed method outperformed four compared state-of-the-art enhancement methods.

An evaluation was carried out of the first prototype (LV-3) of a new night vision device, which incorporates visual field expansion through minification (Minified Augmented-View), to provide feedback for continuing development. Six subjects with night blindness completed visual function measurements and indoor mobility assessments without a device, with the LV-3 and with a commercially available comparison device (the Multi-Vision) at light levels representative of well lit and poorly lit streets. Device performance and potential benefits in real-world situations were evaluated at four outdoor locations (well lit to very dark). Results indicate that the see-through nature and spectacle-frame mounting of the LV-3 address some of the cosmetic and ergonomic disadvantages of currently available devices; however insufficient light sensitivity of the prototype camera limited LV-3 performance. With improved camera sensitivity and full implementation of the Minified-Contours Augmented-View concept in the next prototype, patients might be able to make better use of the novel field expansion and vision multiplexing features to aid outdoor night mobility.

Gaze-contingent display paradigms play an important role in vision research. The time delay due to data transmission from eye tracker to monitor may lead to a misalignment between the gaze direction and image manipulation during eye movements, and therefore compromise the contingency. We present a method to reduce this misalignment by using a compressed exponential function to model the trajectories of saccadic eye movements. Our algorithm was evaluated using experimental data from 1,212 saccades ranging from 3° to 30°, which were collected with an EyeLink 1000 and a Dual-Purkinje Image (DPI) eye tracker. The model fits eye displacement with a high agreement (R² > 0.96). When assuming a 10-millisecond time delay, prediction of 2D saccade trajectories using our model could reduce the misalignment by 30% to 60% with the EyeLink tracker and 20% to 40% with the DPI tracker for saccades larger than 8°. Because a certain number of samples are required for model fitting, the prediction did not offer improvement for most small saccades and the early stages of large saccades. Evaluation was also performed for a simulated 100-Hz gaze-contingent display using the prerecorded saccade data. With prediction, the percentage of misalignment larger than 2° dropped from 45% to 20% for EyeLink and 42% to 26% for DPI data. These results suggest that the saccade-prediction algorithm may help create more accurate gaze-contingent displays.

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