Virtual Teaching and Painting Platform for the Colour Blind

Abstract

Education involves perception of colour and unfortunately some of us are not blessed with this gift of proper vision. Lacking the ability to distinguish certain colours is commonly known as Colour I. Proposed SystemThe software we propose can be used as a dual purpose tool. 1. It can be used as a virtual painting tool for the color blind children 2. It can be used as a virtual teaching tool for the color blind teachers.Both purposes are served by a set of functionalities which use the basic web camera of a computer system only as a resource.  The system using the web camera records the video of the user who holds an object (usually a marker) of a particular color( one of Red, Green, Blue, Cyan, Magenta and Yellow) as a tool used for drawing or writing on the Virtual White Board present on the interface.  This video is displayed separately on the left side of the interface for the user's convenience in case he/she wants to track his/her hand movements. The user holds this object in front of the camera for some time for the system to detect the color of the object on a real time basis.  As soon as the color is detected, the user is prompted about its information on the virtual white board mentioned above. After this, the paint tool gets activated which traces the movement of the object in the user's hands and paints the area (pixels) on the white board according to it.  The tracing of movement is visible to the user and he/she is able to see a rectangular bounding box, surrounding the colored portion of the object, which moves along with the object simultaneously depending on the user's hand movement.  The painting occurs with the color detected by the system in the initial phase. In case the user wants to add a space or a pause in the process of writing or drawing then he/she can click on aPause button present at the bottom of the interface which halts the paint tool accordingly.  The user can also clear the virtual white board using a Clear button.  While writing or drawing if the user feels the need to change the color which he wants to use then he/she can do that using a Change Color button present on the interface. Once this button is clicked, the system re runs the detection tool to detect the color of the next object to be used by the user after which the user can continue his work.  The user can also save his work using a Save button present on the interface which saves the image of the virtual white board in .jpeg format.  The system also allows the user to paint or write on an image or a set of images which can be used as the same virtual board instead of the plain white one given before. This can be done by clicking on a button named Open present on the same interface. It also allows us to open a set of multiple images .