Go TANAKA, Noriaki SUETAKE^*, and Eiji UCHINO

Graduate School of Science and Engineering, Yamaguchi University, Yamaguchi 753-8512, Japan

(Received April 6, 2009; Revised August 31, 2009; Accepted October 13, 2009)

In multimedia content, colors play important roles in conveying visual information. However, color information cannot always be perceived uniformly by all people. People with a color vision deficiency, such as dichromacy, cannot recognize and distinguish certain color combinations. In this paper, an effective lightness modification method, which enables barrier-free color vision for people with dichromacy, especially protanopia or deuteranopia, while preserving the color information in the original image for people with standard color vision, is proposed. In the proposed method, an optimization problem concerning lightness components is first defined by considering color differences in an input image. Then a perceptible and comprehensible color image for both protanopes and viewers with no color vision deficiency or both deuteranopes and viewers with no color vision deficiency is obtained by solving the optimization problem. Through experiments, the effectiveness of the proposed method is illustrated.

Key words: color image, color deficiency, dichromacy, indiscriminable color, confusion loci, lightness modification, minimization problem

^*E-mail address: suetake@sci.yamaguchi-u.ac.jp