[bksvol-discuss] OT: Fwd: Fw: New Software May Offer a Rainbow of Sound
- From: Cindy <popularplace@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: bksvol-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, bookshare-discuss@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Mon, 7 Mar 2005 20:07:26 -0800 (PST)
This is the second article, which I found fascinating.
Cindy
> NewsFactor Network
> Friday, March 04, 2005
>
> New Software May Offer a Rainbow of Sound
>
> By Mike Martin
>
> CAPTION: "We started with the basic research
> question of how to represent a
> detailed color-scaled image to someone who is
> blind," says research
> associate James Ferwerda from the Cornell program in
> computer graphics. "The
> most natural approach was to try sound."
>
> Blue Morning, Blue Day. Yellow Submarine. Brown-eyed
> Girl. Purple People
> Eater.
> >From the Red Hot Chili Peppers to Pink and Pink
> Floyd, music can certainly
> be colorful.
>
> But can color be musical?
>
> Yes -- with the right software, say Cornell
> University researchers who hope
> a rainbow of melodies will bring the color of life
> to the visually impaired.
>
> "Color is something that does not exist in the world
> of a blind person,"
> said Cornell department of electrical and computer
> engineering graduate
> student Victor Wong, who lost his sight in a traffic
> accident at age seven.
> "I could see before, so I know what it is. But there
> is no way that I can
> think of to give an exact idea of color to someone
> who has never seen
> before."
>
>
>
> Color with a Capital See
>
> Necessity is supposed to be the mother of invention,
> and Wong's doctoral
> work -- which required that he read color-scaled
> weather maps of the Earth's
> upper atmosphere -- was the necessity that inspired
> him to invent
> image-to-sound software.
>
> "Color is an extra dimension," in the weather maps,
> Wong explained. Subtle
> color changes represent minute weather fluctuations.
>
> "There is no question that color is one important
> thing communicated
> visually, which blind people would benefit from
> having," said Gary Wunder, a
> University of Missouri (MU) computer programmer and
> president of the
> Missouri chapter of the National Federation of the
> Blind. "This is true not
> only for weather maps, but also for something as
> simple as looking at a
> color-coded timeline."
>
> At first, Wong's graduate advisor Mike Kelley
> verbally described the maps.
> They also tried printing the maps in Braille.
>
> When neither approach worked, they turned to sound.
>
> "We started with the basic research question of how
> to represent a detailed
> color-scaled image to someone who is blind," said
> research associate James
> Ferwerda from the Cornell program in computer
> graphics. "The most natural
> approach was to try sound, since color and pitch can
> be directly related,
> and sensitivity to changes in pitch is quite good."
>
> Cornell undergraduate engineering student Ankur
> Moitra wrote a Java computer
> code that could translate images into sound, and
> later, convert pixels of
> various colors into piano notes of various tones.
>
> Polly Wants a Color
>
> With the new software loaded, Wong guided a stylus
> on a computerized tablet
> with a color photograph of a parrot. With each
> change in color and tone,
> piano notes sang color resolution in 88 gradations,
> ranging from blue for
> the lowest notes to red for the highest.
>
> The software also has an image-to-speech feature
> that reads aloud the
> numerical values of the map's coordinates and values
> associated with a color
> at any given point on the image.
>
> "In principle, I could turn off the music and just
> have the software read
> out the value of each point," Wong told NewsFactor.
>
> To Sea or Not To See
>
> Boundary recognition -- the so-called "land-and-sea"
> problem -- posed
> another challenge.
>
> "Sometimes I just want to know where is the land and
> where is the sea," said
> Wong.
>
> A simple way to delineate boundaries -- coloring the
> right half of an image
> blue and the left half red -- becomes complicated
> because Wong has to move
> the stylus back and forth continuously from one
> color to the next.
>
> Trying to home in on the boundary by this trial and
> error method is
> time-consuming and error-prone, so Wong, Moitra and
> Ferwerda are working to
> develop software that can effectively pick out the
> important boundaries in
> an image.
>
> "Tackling complex color images is only one problem
> out of many that blind
> scientists are facing," Wong explained.
>
> Blind scientists and the visually impaired,
> generally, MU's Wunder noted.
>
> "Inexpensive color recognition could also be helpful
> in matching clothing
> and helping blind people work on circuitry where
> color coding is important,"
> he told NewsFactor.
>
>
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