Paper IEEE TVCG 2009	Paper CG Forum 2010

A Model for Simulation of Color Vision Deficiency and
A Color Contrast Enhancement Technique for Dichromats

Gustavo M. Machado gmmachado@inf.ufrgs.br Master Student

Prof. Dr. Manuel M. Oliveira oliveira@inf.ufrgs.br Advisor

Instituto de Informática, UFRGS

The thesis was presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Computer Science. The thesis committee was formed by Dr. Rosane Minghim (ICMC USP-SC), Dr. Carla Freitas (II UFRGS), and Dr. Marcelo Walter (II UFRGS). The committee unanimously gave the work an “A” (highest) grade.

Contents

Color vision deficiency (CVD) affects approximately 200 million people worldwide, compromising the ability of these individuals to effectively perform color and visualization related tasks. This has a significant impact on their private and professional lives.

This thesis presents a physiologically-based model for simulating color perception. Besides modeling normal color vision, it also accounts for the hereditary and most prevalent cases of color vision deficiency (i.e., protanopia, deuteranopia, protanomaly, and deuteranomaly), which together account for approximately 99.96% of all CVD cases. This model is based on the stage theory of human color vision and is derived from data reported in electrophysiological studies. It is the first model to consistently handle normal color vision, anomalous trichromacy, and dichromacy in a unified way. The proposed model was validated through an experimental evaluation involving groups of color vision deficient individuals and normal color vision ones. This model can provide insights and feedback on how to improve visualization experiences for individuals with CVD. It also provides a framework for testing hypotheses about some aspects of the retinal photoreceptors in color vision deficient individuals.

This thesis also presents an automatic image-recoloring technique for enhancing color contrast for dichromats whose computational cost varies linearly with the number of input pixels. This approach can be efficiently implemented on GPUs, and for typical image sizes it is up to two orders of magnitude faster than the current state-of-the-art technique. Unlike previous approaches, the proposed technique preserves temporal coherence and, therefore, is suitable for video recoloring. This thesis demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed technique by integrating it into a visualization system and showing, for the first time, real-time high-quality recolored visualizations for dichromats.

Master's thesis

		A Physiologically-based Model for Simulation of Color Vision Deficiency Gustavo M. Machado, Manuel M. Oliveira and Leandro A. F. Fernandes IEEE Transactions on Visualization and Computer Graphics. Vol. 15, No. 6, November/December 2009. pp. 1291-1298. [DOI]
		Real-Time Temporal-Coherent Color Contrast Enhancement for Dichromats Gustavo M. Machado and Manuel M. Oliveira Computer Graphics Forum Volume 29 (2010), Number 3, Proceedings of EuroVis 2010, pp. 933-942 (ISSN 0167-7055) [DOI]

Citation

Gustavo M. Machado "A Model for Simulation of Color Vision Deficiency and A Color Contrast Enhancement Technique for Dichromats".  Master’s thesis, UFRGS, Porto Alegre, Brazil (2010).

BibTeX

@MastersThesis{Machado2010msc,
  author  = {Gustavo M. Machado},
  title  = {A Model for Simulation of Color Vision Deficiency and
            A Color Contrast Enhancement Technique for Dichromats},
  school  = {UFRGS},
  address  = {Porto Alegre, Brazil},
  year  = {2010},
}

Keywords

Models of Color Vision, Color Perception, Simulation of Color Vision Deficiency, Recoloring Algorithm, Color-Contrast Enhancement, Color Vision Deficiency, Dichromacy, Anomalous Trichromacy.

We thank Leandro A. F. Fernandes, Giovane Kuhn, and Francisco Pinto for their help in conducting this research.

	CNPq-Brazil fellowships and grants # 200284/2009-6, 131327/2008-9, 476954/2008-8, 305613/2007-3, and 142627/2007-0.