 Every week a group of retirees gets together at Brookside Golf Course in Los Angeles, California. Bill Graham has been a golfer for years and is used to playing with handicaps. But he now plays with a different kind. A severe loss of central vision caused by age-related macular degeneration. The disease has claimed a centered portion of his eyesight where fine details are recognized. The condition affects one out of five Americans over the age of 75. At the first tee, a friend helps line up the shot. Bill has to rely upon his peripheral vision. He sees something like this. Everyday activities like crossing and busy intersection are difficult with macular degeneration. And reading a newspaper is nearly impossible. To date, there is no cure for the disease, just measures to keep it in check. But Dr. Terry Lawton of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California is working on an image-filtering technique that helps people read. It's something people aren't used to doing, looking off to the side to be able to read. But that's where their best vision is now. And these filters make it so that they can read two or four times faster. This is an example of an unfiltered versus a filtered word. Using a closed-circuit viewer, Dr. Lawton measures the number of correct responses given by Mr. Graham during a test that mixes filtered and unfiltered sentences. The dogs swam in the water and played all day. The digitally processed words actually appear less readable for someone with normal sight. The reality is it is more blurred. What Terry Lawton is doing is not creating a crisp, sharp edge. But with her filters, she's creating enhancement of contrast. And even though you don't need that enhancement, so you see the blurring that she's creating, the person who has certain losses needs the contrast more than they need the sharpness of the edge, and they see better with this. I want you to tell me in each one of these circles, standard eye testing until recently never measured an individual's sensitivity to contrast, which is how well various patterns are seen from light to dark. Dr. Lawton has developed a system that very accurately measures this ability. By hitting buttons, Mr. Graham tells a computer whether he sees the pattern on the screen slant to the right or left. The technology pinpoints his best level of contrast sensitivity, which then gets translated into the way words are shaded or filtered. Eventually, closed-circuit viewers will be on the market that magnify and filter words according to an individual's contrast need. As a result of the research, Dr. Lawton sees potential in using this image processing technique for a future Mars rover vision system. It would assist in negotiating boulder fields, such as this photographed by an early Martian probe called Viking. The filtering acts to highlight individual boulders in the same way it uses contrast to emphasize the shape of letters in a word, thus pinpointing obstacles for the rover to avoid. NASA's Human Factors Research and its ties to image processing, helping man and machine extend the ability to see.