Posted by Glenn on 11/06/05 05:49

On Sat, 5 Nov 2005 18:55:02 -0800, "Richard Crowley"
<rcrowley@xpr7t.net> wrote:

>"Glenn" wrote ...
>> I'm Glenn LeDuc, I work for an agency that helps people who are blind
>> and visually impaired find work here in Washington State. For the past
>> year or so I've been working on a making low cost devices to magnify
>> books and other texts and objects for people with low vision that
>> utilizes either a webcam or a composite video camera like a security
>> camera or a camcorder, attached to a PC or to a television.
>>
>> Two of the features that people with some specific eye conditions find
>> very useful, that the commercial devices that cost big money have, are
>> the ability to display a negative of what is being viewed and the
>> ability to display "false colors", so for example, a black and white
>> page of regular text appears to be yellow text on a blue background.
>>
>> On the webcam / PC side I've found a program called dscaler
>> (http://deinterlace.sourceforge.net/) that does the negative image
>> with video from a webcam or from a composite camera run through a usb
>> video digitizer. Also I've been told some hardware video processors
>> can do negative of what is being displayed on a camera or from a
>> video source in real time. The only devices that I've seen so far that
>> have this abiliity are pretty expensive in terms of what I'm reying to
>> come up with (~ $500 or more). I haven't had much luck finding
>> anything that does false colors, either on the PC side or the video
>> side.
>>
>> I'm wondering if any of the video professional or enthusiasts that
>> read these groups could point me towards anything that could produce
>> the negative and false color video on eith a PC or when displayed on a
>> television? If anyone has any advice on this it would be greatly
>> appreciated.
>
>A standalone little box to make the image display in negative
>form would be pretty easy to make (and inexpensive in moderate
>quantities). A standalone box to also do arbitrary colors would
>be a bit more complex to design and expensive to make. There
>may already be a design for one or both of these out on the WWW
>somewhere.
>
>Should be able to do either/both on a computer if it is sufficiently
>beefy. Are you sure there isn't software out there that does this
>already?


Thanks for the response Richard, while I found thatthe dscaler
software can do a negative image, it's real function is to serve as a
deinterlacer for a home theater setup, and therefore it is very
resource intensive. I was hoping to find something that would run on
less that state of the art equipment.

So if I were to search the web for the box you described to do the
negative of a composite signal, were would you suggest looking, or
what search terms wouldf you use?

Thanks Again,

Glenn

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