Optometry study may assist low vision eye patients

Moving images are more easily perceived by the eye than static images, according to a recent IU study.

The study showed motion-generated images help improve image identification for people with low vision, researcher Jing Samantha Pan said.

Researchers determined individuals had a 25 percent better chance of identifying what was happening in an image if the image was moving in a video, rather than if it was static.

Pan and Geoffrey Bingham, Ph.D candidates in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, conducted their study on the optic flow in order to assess the contributions of static images and optic flow to identifying events in the environment.

“Our experiment found that perceiving daily events uses two sources of information: static image-based information called image structure, and dynamic motion-generated information called optic flow,” Pan said in an email.

The team filmed short black-and-white videos of everyday activities, which were then blurred to emulate images seen by someone with low vision, according to their report.

Each video was then split into 20 frames.

Volunteers with normal vision viewed the blurred, static images and were unable to identify what was going on in each image 30 percent of the time.

“This means that our image-based and motion-generated information is very influential in navigating the surroundings of all motion-generated information,” Pan said.

As the experiment progressed, the image structures began to produce blurry images that played in a movie-like sequence.

Once the motion stopped, observers could correctly identify the events through the blurry static frames.

In another test, observers identified only about 25 percent of events with blurry images with no motion.

When the same blurry images were played again in a motioned sequence, the rate of positive identification increased to 90 percent.

When the motion stops, blurry images may continue to inform low vision observers about the surrounding objects and their layout.

Pan and Bingham were able to demonstrate the effect of putting images in motion despite the blur making the static image unrecognizable.

“Image-based and motion-generated information are both important and they compensate each other to give us the most effective perception,” Pan said.