Our technique in action. (a) Original image as perceived by a normal trichromat. (b) Original image as perceived by a deuteronope. (c)-(e) The image going through the pipeline of our method—(c) after overlaying the patterns, (d) after adjusting the contrast to convey the fidelity of the dichromat’s color perception, and (e) after making the line segments continuous. (f) The image in (e) as perceived by a deuteronope.

Using Patterns to Encode Color Information for Dichromats

Behzad Sajadi1

Aditi Majumder1

Manuel M. Oliveira2

Rosália G. Schneider2

Ramesh Raskar3

¹ University of California, Irvine       ²  Instituto de Informática, UFRGS      ³  MIT Media Lab    

IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics.
Volume 19 (2013), Number 1, pp. 118-129. [DOI]

Contents

Color is one of the most common ways to convey information in visualization applications. Color vision deficiency (CVD) affects approximately 200 million individuals worldwide and considerably degrades their performance in understanding such contents by creating red-green or blue-yellow ambiguities. While several content-specific methods have been proposed to resolve these ambiguities, they cannot achieve this effectively in many situations for contents with a large variety of colors. More importantly, they cannot facilitate color identification. We propose a technique for using patterns to encode color information for individuals with CVD, in particular for dichromats. We present the first content-independent method to overlay patterns on colored visualization contents that not only minimizes ambiguities but also allows color identification. Further, since overlaying patterns does not compromise the underlying original colors, it does not hamper the perception of normal trichromats. We validated our method with two user studies: one including 11 subjects with CVD and 19 normal trichromats, and focused on images that use colors to represent multiple categories; and another one including 16 subjects with CVD and 22 normal trichromats, which considered a broader set of images. Our results show that overlaying patterns significantly improves the performance of dichromats in several color-based visualization tasks, making their performance almost similar to normal trichromats’. More interestingly, the patterns augment color information in a positive manner, allowing normal trichromats to perform with greater accuracy.

Paper

Full Paper (pre-print)

The final publication is available at the IEEE TVCG Journal

Video

Citation

B. Sajadi and A. Majumder and M. M. Oliveira and R. G. Schneider and R. Raskar. "Using Patterns to Encode Color Information for Dichromats". IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. Volume 19 (2013), Number 1, pp. 118-129.

BibTeX

@article{10.1109/TVCG.2012.93,
author = {B. Sajadi and A. Majumder and M. M. Oliveira and R. G. Schneider and R. Raskar},
title = {Using Patterns to Encode Color Information for Dichromats},
journal ={IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics},
volume = {19},
number = {1},
issn = {1077-2626},
year = {2013},
pages = {118-129},
doi = {http://doi.ieeecomputersociety.org/10.1109/TVCG.2012.93}
}
  

Keywords

Color vision deficiency, Visual aids, Patterns in visualization, Color visualization

The authors deeply thank our volunteers. Aditi and Behzad would like to acknowledge funding agencies US National Science Foundation (NSF) IIS-0846144. Manuel and Rosália acknowledge CNPq-Brazil fellowships (grants 308936/2010-8 and 131311/2011-5).