A large number of people in the US suffer some form of color blindness or are completely blind. The loss of color discrimination ability impacts the quality of life of these individuals. Iguana Robotics is an innovator in creating color sensors. Our long range goal is to build a device that can recognize the color with a high degree of accuracy. The device will speak the name of the color. It will be ultra-compact, small enough to fit on a key ring. The heart of the device will be a custom designed VLSI chip that will compress a high degree of functionality into a small volume. The most difficult technical problem is accurate identification of color on patterned surfaces, and identifying dark colors. In the phase I proposal we will develop and test algorithms for accurate identification of colors. Our target performance is < 1 percent misclassification error rate and a selling price of < $25.00
