| A study was completed to find an ultra compact Complementary Metal Oxide Semiconductor (CMOS) camera module that could potentially be used in a retinal prosthesis. Various camera modules from different companies were evaluated. The one with the highest frame rate, most features and most reasonable cost was obtained from CMOS Sensor, Inc. The camera was evaluated under lab conditions using the CAMagic software that came with it and "Lenna's Image" was considered the test image throughout the project. The video file captured by the CMOS camera was then compressed using the MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG 4 and DivX codecs available in various video converter softwares. Different frame rate settings were used for comparison. The resulting compressed files were compared for optimum quality and file size. The most efficiently compressed file was then used for further shrinking. Lastly, software was evaluated to convert the high-resolution image to a very low-resolution image down to only 5 x 5 pixels without resizing the overall height and width of the original video. Thus, a system was developed that captures image video, compresses it and then reduces its resolution for the ongoing retinal prosthesis project in the Electrical and Computer Engineering Department. |
