A vision for the blind

摘要

The World Health Organisation's definition of human blindness includes a lot of people who are severely visually impaired but who nevertheless retain a degree of residual or peripheral vision. The test is whether someone can see how many fingers are held up at a distance of 3m, using glasses or lenses as appropriate: if not, they are counted as blind. Work that's been going at the University of Oxford's department of clinical neurosciences, however, aims to turn this diagnosis around for a lot of people on the margins of being classified as blind. Researchers Stephen Hicks and Luis Moreno have been working on a system that would enhance sight for the visually impaired, producing clear images near to the eyeball for those who retain some vision at close distances. Their work uses a lot of the simulation and vision systems expertise that is built into National Instruments' modules used to develop industrial vision systems, and the whole system was created in NI's Lab View graphical programming language because, said Hicks, "I have found that no other application development environment offers such fast and flexible software development and debugging".