Modeling the role of fixational eye movements in real-world scenes

Abstract

Cite this article as: Andrés Olmedo-Payá, Antonio Martínez-Álvarez, Sergio Cuenca-Asensi, J.M. Ferrández, E. Fernández, Modeling the role of fixational eye movements in real-world scenes, Neurocomputing, http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j. neucom. 2014.09.068 This is a PDF file of an unedited manuscript that has been accepted for publication. As a service to our customers we are providing this early version of the manuscript. The manuscript will undergo copyediting, typesetting, and review of the resulting galley proof before it is published in its final citable form. Please note that during the production process errors may be discovered which could affect the content, and all legal disclaimers that apply to the journal pertain. AbstractOur eyes never remain still. Even when we stare at a fixed point, small involuntary movements take place in our eyes in an imperceptible manner.Researchers agree on the presence of three main contributions to eye movements when we fix the gaze: microsaccades, drifts and tremor. These small movements carry the image across the retina stimulating the photoreceptors and thus avoiding fading. Nowadays it is commonly accepted that these movements can improve the discrimination performance of the retina. In this paper, several retina models with and without fixational eye movements were implemented by mean of RetinaStudio tool to test the feasability of these models to be incorporated in future neuroprostheses. For this purpose each retina model has been stimulated with natural scenes images in two experiments. Results are discussed from the point of view of a neuroprosthesis development.

Retinal stimulation strategies to restore vision: Fundamentals and systems

“…Lorach et al (2012) demonstrated the feasibility to reconstruct the spatiotemporal properties of several ganglion cell groups with the visual inputs from an asynchronous contrast sensor, which supposedly provides improved temporal precision compared to the conventional frame-based image inputs. More recently, incorporating the involuntary eye movements (microsaccades, drifts and tremor) in the retina models was shown to improve the visual sensitivity to temporal and spatial changes in luminance (Olmedo-Payá et al, 2015). This type of retina encoder conceptualized a retinotopic input-output transformation, but it was far from a cell-specific strategy.…”

Development of visual Neuroprostheses: trends and challenges

“…In this framework some authors are starting to incorporate these involuntary eye movements into their retinal models using different strategies: micro-saccades, drifts and tremor. The results show that transforming an originally stationary image into one that varies spatiotemporally (thus mimicking real fixational eye movements) improve feature estimation (Martínez-Álvarez et al, 2013;Olmedo-Paya et al, 2015).…”