Personalizing image enhancement for critical visual tasks: improved legibility of papyri using color processing and visual illusions
This work addresses the challenge of improving image legibility for critical visual tasks in papyrology, offering incremental algorithmic improvements and a framework for personalization.
The paper tackled the problem of enhancing script legibility in papyri texts for scholarly editing by developing algorithms based on color processing and visual illusions, which outperformed classic methods in a user experiment, though no single method satisfied all user factors, leading to a recommendation for personalized method choices.
Purpose: This article develops theoretical, algorithmic, perceptual, and interaction aspects of script legibility enhancement in the visible light spectrum for the purpose of scholarly editing of papyri texts. - Methods: Novel legibility enhancement algorithms based on color processing and visual illusions are compared to classic methods in a user experience experiment. - Results: (1) The proposed methods outperformed the comparison methods. (2) Users exhibited a broad behavioral spectrum, under the influence of factors such as personality and social conditioning, tasks and application domains, expertise level and image quality, and affordances of software, hardware, and interfaces. No single enhancement method satisfied all factor configurations. Therefore, it is suggested to offer users a broad choice of methods to facilitate personalization, contextualization, and complementarity. (3) A distinction is made between casual and critical vision on the basis of signal ambiguity and error consequences. The criteria of a paradigm for enhancing images for critical applications comprise: interpreting images skeptically; approaching enhancement as a system problem; considering all image structures as potential information; and making uncertainty and alternative interpretations explicit, both visually and numerically.