every good group of retirees gets
together at brookside golf course in Los
Angeles California bill graham has been
a golfer for years and is used to
playing with handicaps but he now plays
with a different kind a severe loss of
central vision caused by age-related
macular degeneration the disease's
claimed a center portion of his eyesight
we're fine details are recognized before
the condition of X 1 out of 5 americans
over the age of 75 right there
at the first team a friend helps line up
the shot bill has to rely upon his
peripheral vision he sees something like
this
every day activities like crossing a
busy intersection are difficult with
macular degeneration and reading a
newspaper is nearly impossible to date
there is no cure for the disease just
measures to keep it in check but dr.
Terry Lawton of NASA's Jet Propulsion
Laboratory in Pasadena California is
working on an image filtering technique
next that helps people read it's
something people aren't used to doing
looking off to the side to be able to
read but that's where their best vision
is now and these filters make it so that
they can read two or four times faster
this is an example of an unfiltered
versus of filtered word using a closed
circuit viewer dr. Lawton measures the
number of correct responses given by mr.
Graham during a test that mixes filtered
and unfiltered sentences the dogs swam
in the water and played all day the
digitally processed words actually
appear less readable for someone with
normal sight the reality is it is more
blurred where terlatin is doing is not
creating a crisp sharp edge but with her
filters she's creating enhancement of
contrast and even though you don't need
that enhancement so you see the blurring
that she's creating the person who has
certain losses needs the contrast more
than they need a sharpness of the edge
and they see better with this I want you
to tell me each one of these circles
standard I testing until recently never
measured an individual sensitivity to
contrast which is how well various
patterns are seen from light to dark dr.
Lawton has developed the system that
very accurately measures this ability by
hitting buttons mr. Graham tells a
computer whether he sees the pattern on
a screen slant to the right or left the
technology pinpoints his best level of
contrast sensitivity which then gets
translated into the way words are shaded
or filtered eventually closed circuit
viewers will be on the market that
magnify and filter words
with a long did Jules contrast that to
hear the birch as a result of the
research dr. Lawton sees potential in
using this image processing technique
for a future Mars rover vision system it
would assist in negotiating Boulder
fields such as this photographed by an
early Martian probe called Viking the
filtering acts to highlight individual
boulders in the same way it uses
contrast to emphasize the shape of
letters in a word thus pinpointing
obstacles for the rover to avoid NASA's
human factors research and its ties to
image processing helping man and machine
extend the ability to see
you