[blindza] Fw: Computer program allows the blind to 'see' with sound
- From: "Jacob Kruger" <jacob@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: "NAPSA Blind" <blind@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Thu, 6 Mar 2014 22:44:30 +0200
----- Original Message ----- Hi All,
Another article appeared today in Science Magazine, as appended.
Best wishes,
Peter Meijer
Seeing with Sound - The vOICe
http://www.seeingwithsound.com/winvoice.htm
Computer program allows the blind to 'see' with sound.
By Thomas Sumner.
Video URL: http://bcove.me/18v6bn47
A man blind since birth is taking up a surprising new hobby: photography.
His
newfound passion is thanks to a system that turns images into sequences of
sound. The technology not only gives “sight” to the blind, but also
challenges
the way neurologists think the brain is organized.
In 1992, Dutch engineer Peter Meijer created vOICe, an algorithm that
converts
simple grayscale images into musical soundscapes. (The capitalized middle
letters sound out “Oh, I see!”). The system scans images from left to right,
converting shapes in the image into sound as it sweeps, with higher
positions in
the image corresponding to higher sound frequencies. For instance, a
diagonal
line stretching upward from left to right becomes a series of ascending
musical
notes. While more complicated images, such as a person sitting on a lawn
chair,
at first seem like garbled noise, with enough training users can learn to
“hear”
everyday scenes.
In 2007, neuroscientist Amir Amedi and his colleagues at the Hebrew
University
of Jerusalem began training subjects who were born blind to use vOICe.
Despite
having no visual reference points, after just 70 hours of training, the
individuals went from “hearing” simple dots and lines to “seeing” whole
images
such as faces and street corners composed of 4500 pixels. (For comparison,
Nintendo’s Mario was made up of just 192 pixels in his first video game
appearance.) By attaching a head-mounted camera to a computer and
headphones,
the blind users were even able to navigate around a room by the sound cues
alone. Every few steps the system snaps a photo and converts it into sound,
giving the users their bearings as they traverse tables and trashcans. One
patient even took up photography, using the head-mounted system to frame his
snapshots.
The training program also devoted 10 hours to recognizing human silhouettes
represented by sound. By the end of the training, participants could detect
the
exact posture of the person represented by the soundscape and replicate the
pose, the team reports online today in Current Biology.
When the researchers mapped the brain activity of the participants, they
found
something astonishing. The generally accepted model of the brain contains
regions devoted to each sense, such as the sight-centric visual cortex.
Researchers had long believed that if those regions aren’t used for their
intended sense, they are repurposed for other uses; for example, the visual
cortex of someone blind from birth could be used to help boost her hearing.
But
Amedi and his colleagues found that the area of the visual cortex
responsible
for recognizing body shapes in sighted people—called the extrastriate body
area—lit up with activity in the study participants when they were
interpreting
the human silhouettes.
Amedi says the traditional sensory-organized brain model can’t explain this
activity; after all, the subjects only heard the information, and scientists
believed that the body-recognizing area shouldn’t have fully developed
without
visual experiences during development. Neuroscientist Ella Striem-Amit of
Harvard University, who co-authored the paper, thinks it’s time for a new
model.
“The brain, it turns out, is a task machine, not a sensory machine,” she
says.
“You get areas that process body shapes with whatever input you give
them—the
visual cortex doesn’t just process visual information.”
Ione Fine, a neuroscientist at the University of Washington, Seattle, who
studies brain changes and did not work on the project, says Amedi’s work is
the
best evidence yet for functional constancy—the idea that areas of the brain
do
the same job even with different kinds of input. "The idea that the
organization
of blind people’s brains is a direct analog to the organization of sighted
people’s brains is an extreme one—it has an elegance you rarely actually see
in
practice," she says. "If this hypothesis is true, and this is strong
evidence
that it is, it means we have a deep insight into the brain." In an
alternative
task-oriented brain model, parts of the brain responsible for similar
tasks—such
as speech, reading, and language—would be closely linked together.
Amedi's team recently released a successor to vOICe, called EyeMusic, as a
free
iPhone app. The new algorithm produces more pleasant tones and can even
provide
color information. In the above video, a man blind since birth uses EyeMusic
to
“see” drawn faces. Amedi hopes EyeMusic will help blind users gain more
independence and improve their quality of life.
(Video credit: Amedi Lab)
Source URL:
http://news.sciencemag.org/biology/2014/03/computer-program-allows-blind-see-sound
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