scholarly journals A Wearable Navigation Device for Visually Impaired People Based on the Real-Time Semantic Visual SLAM System

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 1536
Author(s):  
Zhuo Chen ◽  
Xiaoming Liu ◽  
Masaru Kojima ◽  
Qiang Huang ◽  
Tatsuo Arai
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Semantic Information ◽  
Visual Slam ◽  
Control Center ◽  
Computing Platform ◽  
Surrounding Environment ◽  
Visually Impaired People ◽  
Localization And Mapping ◽  
Impaired People

Wearable auxiliary devices for visually impaired people are highly attractive research topics. Although many proposed wearable navigation devices can assist visually impaired people in obstacle avoidance and navigation, these devices cannot feedback detailed information about the obstacles or help the visually impaired understand the environment. In this paper, we proposed a wearable navigation device for the visually impaired by integrating the semantic visual SLAM (Simultaneous Localization And Mapping) and the newly launched powerful mobile computing platform. This system uses an Image-Depth (RGB-D) camera based on structured light as the sensor, as the control center. We also focused on the technology that combines SLAM technology with the extraction of semantic information from the environment. It ensures that the computing platform understands the surrounding environment in real-time and can feed it back to the visually impaired in the form of voice broadcast. Finally, we tested the performance of the proposed semantic visual SLAM system on this device. The results indicate that the system can run in real-time on a wearable navigation device with sufficient accuracy.

scholarly journals Electronic Orientation Aid for Visually Impaired using Graphics Processing Unit (GPU)

2020 ◽  
Vol 32 ◽  
pp. 03054
Author(s):  
Akshata Parab ◽  
Rashmi Nagare ◽  
Omkar Kolambekar ◽  
Parag Patil
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Graphics Processing Unit ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
Processing Unit ◽  
Surrounding Environment ◽  
Visually Impaired People ◽  
Impaired People ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Graphics Processing

Vision is one of the very essential human senses and it plays a major role in human perception about surrounding environment. But for people with visual impairment their definition of vision is different. Visually impaired people are often unaware of dangers in front of them, even in familiar environment. This study proposes a real time guiding system for visually impaired people for solving their navigation problem and to travel without any difficulty. This system will help the visually impaired people by detecting the objects and giving necessary information about that object. This information may include what the object is, its location, its precision, distance from the visually impaired etc. All these information will be conveyed to the person through audio commands so that they can navigate freely anywhere anytime with no or minimal assistance. Object detection is done using You Only Look Once (YOLO) algorithm. As the process of capturing the video/images and sending it to the main module has to be carried at greater speed, Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) is used. This will help in enhancing the overall speed of the system and will help the visually Impaired to get the maximum necessary instructions as quickly as possible. The process starts from capturing the real time video, sending it for analysis and processing and get the calculated results. The results obtained from analysis are conveyed to user by means of hearing aid. As a result by this system the blind or the visually impaired people can visualize the surrounding environment and travel freely from source to destination on their own.

scholarly journals Wearable Travel Aid for Environment Perception and Navigation of Visually Impaired People

Electronics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (6) ◽  
pp. 697 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jinqiang Bai ◽  
Zhaoxiang Liu ◽  
Yimin Lin ◽  
Ye Li ◽  
Shiguo Lian ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Social Inclusion ◽  
Speech Synthesis ◽  
Semantic Information ◽  
Assistive Device ◽  
Measurement Unit ◽  
Human Machine Interaction ◽  
Visually Impaired People ◽  
Impaired People ◽  
Indoor And Outdoor

Assistive devices for visually impaired people (VIP) which support daily traveling and improve social inclusion are developing fast. Most of them try to solve the problem of navigation or obstacle avoidance, and other works focus on helping VIP to recognize their surrounding objects. However, very few of them couple both capabilities (i.e., navigation and recognition). Aiming at the above needs, this paper presents a wearable assistive device that allows VIP to (i) navigate safely and quickly in unfamiliar environment, and (ii) to recognize the objects in both indoor and outdoor environments. The device consists of a consumer Red, Green, Blue and Depth (RGB-D) camera and an Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU), which are mounted on a pair of eyeglasses, and a smartphone. The device leverages the ground height continuity among adjacent image frames to segment the ground accurately and rapidly, and then search the moving direction according to the ground. A lightweight Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based object recognition system is developed and deployed on the smartphone to increase the perception ability of VIP and promote the navigation system. It can provide the semantic information of surroundings, such as the categories, locations, and orientations of objects. Human–machine interaction is performed through audio module (a beeping sound for obstacle alert, speech recognition for understanding the user commands, and speech synthesis for expressing semantic information of surroundings). We evaluated the performance of the proposed system through many experiments conducted in both indoor and outdoor scenarios, demonstrating the efficiency and safety of the proposed assistive system.

Obstacle and Fall Detection to Guide the Visually Impaired People with Real Time Monitoring

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mohammad Marufur Rahman ◽  
Md. Milon Islam ◽  
Shishir Ahmmed ◽  
Saeed Anwar Khan
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Fall Detection ◽  
Real Time Monitoring ◽  
Visually Impaired People ◽  
Impaired People

scholarly journals Efficient Multi-Object Detection and Smart Navigation Using Artificial Intelligence for Visually Impaired People

Entropy ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (9) ◽  
pp. 941
Author(s):  
Rakesh Chandra Joshi ◽  
Saumya Yadav ◽  
Malay Kishore Dutta ◽  
Carlos M. Travieso-Gonzalez
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Object Detection ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Auditory Information ◽  
Visually Impaired People ◽  
Video Frames ◽  
Average Accuracy ◽  
Impaired People ◽  
Impaired Person

Visually impaired people face numerous difficulties in their daily life, and technological interventions may assist them to meet these challenges. This paper proposes an artificial intelligence-based fully automatic assistive technology to recognize different objects, and auditory inputs are provided to the user in real time, which gives better understanding to the visually impaired person about their surroundings. A deep-learning model is trained with multiple images of objects that are highly relevant to the visually impaired person. Training images are augmented and manually annotated to bring more robustness to the trained model. In addition to computer vision-based techniques for object recognition, a distance-measuring sensor is integrated to make the device more comprehensive by recognizing obstacles while navigating from one place to another. The auditory information that is conveyed to the user after scene segmentation and obstacle identification is optimized to obtain more information in less time for faster processing of video frames. The average accuracy of this proposed method is 95.19% and 99.69% for object detection and recognition, respectively. The time complexity is low, allowing a user to perceive the surrounding scene in real time.

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