All the colors of the rainbow
A breakthrough by a research team in Hong Kong is set to allow color-blind people to view almost natural colors on screens. Li Yinze reports.
The color blind Aussie businessman was completely unprepared for what happened when he walked into the electronics fair and donned a pair of special glasses. For the first time in his life he could distinguish the colors red and green. Peter Marragg has suffered from color blindness all his life.
What made the experience even more important to him was the knowledge that from now on he could see those colors through the glasses, while enjoying a movie or a television program with his family, who are not color blind.
Computer and engineering scientists at the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) made the breakthrough that opens up a whole new onscreen world of almost natural color for people like Marragg.
The breakthrough comes from manipulating the colors that often bedevil color deficient people onto two separate screens. The colors are reorganized on those screens to make the color distinctions easier to recognize for people with color blindness. The device has no effect on people with normal vision. They see the screen as they normally would.
“Red and green used to appear as the same color to me,” Marragg said, “but now I can easily distinguish the differences.”
The application, developed by computer scientist Samuel Shen Wuyao and his team, can be installed on any regular 3D display device. Color blind football fans now can distinguish between the colors of players’ jerseys.
The problem for color blind and color deficient people begins with the light receptors of the eyes — the rods and cones — which transmit information from the eyes to the brain. Input
The ability to distinguish color resides in the three different types of cones in the human eye. Generally speaking the cones are sensitive to red, blue and green, respectively.
Color blindness is a condition usually inherited through a faulty gene in the X chromosome from the mother. Because females have two X chromosomes, they usually compensate for deficiency in one, thus the vast majority of people affected by color deficiency are men.
Telling red from green
The problem with color blindness is that the light-sensitive cones of the retina function at “below normal” sensitivity. Those afflicted with the deficiency are unable to discriminate between colors.
The most common type of color blindness, for example, is red-green color deficiency. Some people suffer from blueyellow color blindness. People at the extreme end of color blindness can see only black and white.
The different colors we see are distinguished by their wavelengths on the electromagnetic spectrum, of which the visible spectrum is but a small part. The variability of the wavelength determines Output image pair Without stereoscopic glasses With stereoscopic glasses Normal audience (wearing nothing) color deficient audience (wearing glasses) the colors people see. People with defective vision cannot perceive the “just noticeable” differences by which colors normally are perceived.
Although there is currently no cure for color blindness, the CUHK application provides color enhancement. The CUHK team developed an application that produces a pair of virtually identical images and displays them on the viewing device. The separate images are re-colored to emphasize the differences.
According to the type and severity of the patient’s color blindness, each image can be re-colored into hues and color
A very large number of people have problems distinguishing colors when they do day-to-day work, using computers, for example, which limits their choices of occupation.” Samuel Shen Wuyao, computer scientist and member of a Chinese University of Hong Kong team who created an application that can be installed on regular 3D display devices to help color blind people distinguish colors