Image Content Enhancement Through Salient Regions Segmentation for People With Color Vision Deficiencies.

Alessandro Bruno,Roberto Pirrone,Calogero Carlo Giunta,Edoardo Ardizzone,Francesco Gugliuzza

doi:10.1177/2041669519841073

Abstract

Color vision deficiencies affect visual perception of colors and, more generally, color images. Several sciences such as genetics, biology, medicine, and computer vision are involved in studying and analyzing vision deficiencies. As we know from visual saliency findings, human visual system tends to fix some specific points and regions of the image in the first seconds of observation summing up the most important and meaningful parts of the scene. In this article, we provide some studies about human visual system behavior differences between normal and color vision-deficient visual systems. We eye-tracked the human fixations in first 3 seconds of observation of color images to build real fixation point maps. One of our contributions is to detect the main differences between the aforementioned human visual systems related to color vision deficiencies by analyzing real fixation maps among people with and without color vision deficiencies. Another contribution is to provide a method to enhance color regions of the image by using a detailed color mapping of the segmented salient regions of the given image. The segmentation is performed by using the difference between the original input image and the corresponding color blind altered image. A second eye-tracking of color blind people with the images enhanced by using recoloring of segmented salient regions reveals that the real fixation points are then more coherent (up to 10%) with the normal visual system. The eye-tracking data collected during our experiments are in a publicly available dataset called Eye-Tracking of Color Vision Deficiencies.

Highlights

Scientific studies revealed that the most common form of color vision deficiency is encoded on the X sex chromosome; this is why color blindness is more widely diffused among males than females
We want to describe our findings with respect to the behavior of people with protanopia and deuteranopia, after that we performed the enhancement processing steps highlighted in the previous section
We conducted experiments with people affected by protanopia and deuteranopia and we collected the real fixation point maps to be evaluated with metrics such as normalized scanpath saliency (NSS) and area under curve (AUC) focused on visual perception processes

Summary

Introduction

Scientific studies revealed that the most common form of color vision deficiency is encoded on the X sex chromosome; this is why color blindness is more widely diffused among males than females. Deutan color vision deficiencies are by far the most common forms of color blindness This subtype of red–green color blindness affects about 8% of the male population, mostly in its mild form deuteranomaly (Simunovic, 2010). RGB anomaloscope color blindness test consists of two different lamps with different lights to be matched, and it is a well-known and accurate tool to classify color blindness It was developed by a German ophthalmologist more than 100 years ago, and it is still being used internationally to check color vision deficiencies and specific subtypes (Lakowski, 1969). A pseudoisochromatic color plate test called color vision testing made easy has been proposed by Cotter, Lee, and French (1999) It was designed for all age groups; it uses the identification of simple shapes and objects to detect red–green color deficiencies. The experiments confirmed the improvements of processing steps on CBI by means of Ishihara test plates

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