AbstractThe cost of vision loss worldwide has been estimated at nearly $3 trillion (http://www.amdalliance.org/cost-of-blindness.html). Non-preventable diseases cause a significant proportion of blindness in developed nations and will become more prevalent as people live longer. Prosthetic vision technologies including retinal implants will play an important therapeutic role. Retinal implants convert an input image stream to visual percepts via stimulation of the retina. This paper highlights some barriers to restoring functional human vision for current generation visual prosthetic devices that computer vision can help overcome. Such computer vision is interactive, aiming to restore function including visuo-motor tasks and recognition.