EVALUATING VIDEO ENHANCEMENT FOR VISUALLY IMPAIRED VIEWERS

For people with visual impairments, the ability to identify visual details is limited due to losses in visual acuity and contrast sensitivity. This becomes particularly problematic when they are engaged in such tasks as reading and face recognition. In 1984, Peli and Peli (see also Peli et al., 1986) proposed contrast enhancement as a means of improving detail perception for visually impaired populations. Peli et al. (1991) tested the effects of contrast enhancement on face recognition. Visually impaired viewers were asked to judge whether a face was that of a celebrity. Most (85%) of the patients tested increased their face recognition performance when the images were enhanced.