FEBRUARY 22, 2000, 1:00 PM
Robert W. Massof

Lions Vision Research and Rehabilitation Center Wilmer Ophthalmological Institute Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine

Computer-Assisted Electro-Optical Low Vision Enhancement

ABSTRACT

Approximately 3 million people in the U.S. have severe chronic visual impairments, called low vision, that interfere with their ability to function normally in daily living. The most common types of visual impairments that cause low vision are loss of visual acuity (i.e., loss of resolution), loss of contrast sensitivity (i.e., loss of ability to resolve differences in gray levels), loss of ability to adapt visually to changes in illumination, and outright blind spots in regions of the visual field. Remaining vision can be enhanced by modifying the visual image to compensate for the visual impairments or by extracting information from the image and presenting it in a different format. This presentation will review the types of visual impairments experienced by low vision patients, electro-optical vision enhancement technology, and how vision can be enhanced with computer-assisted image processing and image analysis.