Technique enhances digital television viewing for visually-impaired

Scientists at Schepens Eye Research Institute have found that people with low vision can improve their ability to see and enjoy television with a new technique that allows them to enhance the contrast of images of people and objects of interest on their digital televisions.

A study in the edition of the Journal of the Optical Society of America published online in November 2007 and issued in print in January 2008, demonstrates that patients with macular degeneration prefer watching TV with this contrast enhancement and that the level of enhancement they choose depends on how much vision they have lost with their disease.

Nearly four million Americans suffer from vision loss from diseases--such as macular degeneration--that impede their central vision and their ability to comfortably view the images on any television, cutting them off from a significant source of information and entertainment enjoyed by the mainstream.

Often such patients cannot see faces of characters or other details that make a broadcast understandable. Some solutions have been special telescopic glasses, which can help patients see details but often cut off parts of the image, lessening context, and large television screens, which can be quite costly.

The new method--developed by Dr. Eli Peli, the Institute’s low vision expert, the Moakley Scholar in Aging Eye Research, and a professor of ophthalmology at Harvard Medical School, is the latest of several image-enhancing innovations his research team has created to improve TV watching for the visually impaired. It is also the first developed for digital television images. “We knew it was time to address the changing technology,” says Peli, who pointed out that digital television will replace traditional television technology over the next few years due to government mandate.

Working within the “decoder” that makes digital television images possible, Peli and his colleagues were able to make a simple change that could give every digital TV the contrast enhancing potential for the benefit of the visually impaired. “The same modification could easily be made to new HDTVs, and digital cable set top boxes,” says Matthew Fullerton, the paper’s first author, and a student of electronic engineering from the University of York in England who is currently working on his Master’s degree in Peli’s lab.

To test their new technology, the team presented eight digital videos to 24 subjects with vision impairment and six with normal vision. Each patient was given a remote control, which allowed him/her to increase or decrease the contrast of the image. Patients manipulated over-enhanced and blurry images for the greatest clarity.

The research team learned that even subjects with normal sight selected some enhancement and that the amount of enhancement selected by those with visual problems varied depending upon the level of contrast sensitivity loss they experienced due to their disease. All this demonstrated to the team that the device was both usable and useful to the subjects, even those without vision problems.

Peli is now working with Analog Devices Inc. to create a prototype chip that could be included in all future generations of digital television. “The technology we created is quite simple and can easily and cheaply be incorporated into even the newest technologies for television and internet video.”

Peli adds that he believes that as the population ages, this technology will be used by more and more of those whose eyes are going through a normal change as they get older as well as those more severely impaired.

Source: Schepens Eye Research Institute

Related stories:

Television, Internet -- what's next?
Watch 3-D television without stereo glasses, use screens with-out touching them, download video with no loss of quality – in future this will be the norm for media technology. At the IFA consumer electronics fair in Berlin, the Fraunhofer Institute for Telecommunications, Heinrich-Hertz-Institut, HHI, will be demonstrating how.
Sony, GUBA sign movie distribution deal
Sony and online entertainment site GUBA have signed an online movie distribution deal to bring 100 Sony films for sale to the site's users.
Tech File: NXT plc makes audio waves
UPI recently caught up with Graham Ryan, chief commercial officer of NXT plc, a publicly listed company on the London stock exchange. For those who don't know, NXT is a provider of unique sound solutions, best known for its flat-panel loudspeaker technology, which is then licensed and used in a broad spectrum of audio technologies for everything from flat-panel speakers to television and cell-phone audio. It's likely that most consumers have encountered their audio solutions somewhere.
Interview: LG Electronics
United Press International recently caught up with JM Lee, president of LG Electronics USA Inc.'s Consumer Electronics Brand Division, to get some insight into what makes the $45 billion LG Electronics tick. This question-and-answer session covers everything from LG's brand identity to some of its recent hardware decisions. One of those decisions announced in this interview is that LG is not going to enter the MP3 player market at this time.
In Brief: Nokia, ATI ally on mobile multimedia
Nokia and ATI Technologies will work together to improve mobile multimedia service content.
In Brief: Sprint offers Spanish channel service
Sprint debuted its first Spanish-language video and audio service for mobile phones in the United States Thursday.
Movies-for-download making inroads
U.K. movie-goers now have easier access to Hollywood blockbusters anywhere they go thanks to Universal Pictures. The studio giant will allow customers to purchase movies to keep in three different downloadable formats onto computers, mobile phones or portable video players.
Digital killed the video store
The livelihood of video stores and online rentals might be numbered, now that the video-download movement is underway. The dawn of convenient video downloads of movie and television shows follows in the steps of audio music and music videos, and more companies are jumping on the bandwagon, trying to tap into a chunk of this growing industry.

News discussion:

Technology news