Image data transformation for tactile texture display

Abstract

The authors have investigated a tactile texture presentation method by which a tactile texture display is driven to convey the sensations of object's surface textures. The image data (a B/W photograph taken carefully) of surface textures proved to be compatible with the surface geometry data-a height map-by an experiment with two simple-shape real texture patches. As a raw geometry data-hence a raw image-was not suitable for the texture display, they proposed to apply a histogram transformation to make the sensation produced by the data close to the real one. They obtained two histogram transformations out of fifty, by which the geometry data were adjusted so that they could best produce texture sensations regarding six real patches. The data adjusted by the transformations proved to present appropriate sensations to novice users who compared the data and the real patches tactually.