Home Department: Computer Science
Mentor: E.J. Chichilnisky (Neurosurgery and Ophthalmology)

“Efficacy of Wired-OR Compression in Vision Reconstruction”

The goal of the Artificial Retina Project is to work towards an implantable chip to restore vision to those with incurable blindness. The lab has developed many highly successful algorithms towards this goal using recorded full bandwidth data. However, it is not feasible to get such full bandwidth data, as the power consumption of such a chip would be impossibly high for a biological system. To mitigate this problem, the lab recently developed a chip architecture that highly compresses the data, massively reducing power consumption while only reading critical values. For Swetha’s project, she will develop an efficient real-time simulation of this chip for use during experimentation, analyze its efficacy for use in previously developed algorithms by comparing results to that of full bandwidth data, and eventually work towards optimizing the algorithms on this compressed data.