J. Eng. Technol. Sci., Vol. 49, No. 5, 2017, 671-688 671 Received January 16 th , 2017, 1 st Revision April 25 th , 2017, 2 nd Revision June 19 th , 2017, Accepted for publication November 30 th , 2017. Copyright ©2017 Published by ITB Journal Publisher, ISSN: 2337-5779, DOI: 10.5614/j.eng.technol.sci.2017.49.5.8 Design of Mobile Application for Assisting Color Blind People to Identify Information on Sign Boards Bhagya R Navada & Santhosh Krishna Venkata * Department of Instrumentation and Control Engineering, Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal Academy of Higher Education, Manipal 576104, Karnataka, India *E-mail: kv.santhu@gmail.com Abstract. Color blindness is a condition where a person cannot distinguish colors that are of similar contrast. This paper reports an attempt to develop a mobile phone application that can run on any Android or Windows smart phone. The developed application/software tool is able to assist color blind people by converting an image with low contrast to an image with high contrast. The objective of the proposed work was to develop a program on the LabVIEW platform to i) acquire the image whose information should be processed, ii) develop an algorithm to display a high-contrast crisp image of the actual dull image, and iii) identify the colors and characters present in the dull image for messaging to the user’s phone. The work was implemented on the LabVIEW platform making use of various image processing tools to identify the color and text from the sign board that otherwise cannot be identified by color blind persons. The implementation was tested with several inputs to validate the performance of the proposed method. It was able to produce accurate results for more than 97.3% of the test inputs. Keywords: color blindness; image processing; LabVIEW; mobile application; rehabilitation. 1 Introduction Color has a key role in almost all areas of life as it is one of the main elements for characterizing people, objects, materials, etc. Thus color has an impact virtually everywhere; it is even used for teaching kindergarten students. Color is used more often as a point of attraction compared to any other tool. In industries color can be used to represent a range of parameters, where one color is used to represent the safe range and another one to represent the danger range; these changes in color provide feedback to the operator for smooth control of the parameters. Color is also used as a marketing tool to attract consumers. Color blindness is the inability to identify or differentiate colors and it affects approximately 8% of men and around 1% of women. Color blindness can be for all the colors or for a few colors only, causing color blind persons to not be able