A survey on computer vision technology in Camera Based ETA devices

Electronic Travel Aid systems are expected to make impaired persons able to perform their everyday tasks such as finding an object and avoiding obstacles easier. Among ETA devices, Camera Based ETA devices are the new one and with a high potential for helping Visually Impaired Persons. With recent advances in computer science and specially computer vision, Camera Based ETA devices used several computer vision algorithms and techniques such as object recognition and stereo vision in order to help VIP to perform tasks such as reading banknotes, recognizing people and avoiding obstacles. This paper analyses and appraises a number of literatures in this area with focus on stereo vision technique. Finally, after discussing about the methods and techniques used in different literatures, it is concluded that the stereo vision is the best technique for helping VIP in their everyday navigation

A multimodal smartphone interface for active perception by visually impaired

The diffuse availability of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, has the potential to bring substantial benefits to the people with sensory impairments. The solution proposed in this paper is part of an ongoing effort to create an accurate obstacle and hazard detector for the visually impaired, which is embedded in a hand-held device. In particular, it presents a proof of concept for a multimodal interface to control the orientation of a smartphone's camera, while being held by a person, using a combination of vocal messages, 3D sounds and vibrations. The solution, which is to be evaluated experimentally by users, will enable further research in the area of active vision with human-in-the-loop, with potential application to mobile assistive devices for indoor navigation of visually impaired people

Indoor assistance for visually impaired people using a RGB-D camera

In this paper a navigational aid for visually impaired people is presented. The system uses a RGB-D camera to perceive the environment and implements self-localization, obstacle detection and obstacle classification. The novelty of this work is threefold. First, self-localization is performed by means of a novel camera tracking approach that uses both depth and color information. Second, to provide the user with semantic information, obstacles are classified as walls, doors, steps and a residual class that covers isolated objects and bumpy parts on the floor. Third, in order to guarantee real time performance, the system is accelerated by offloading parallel operations to the GPU. Experiments demonstrate that the whole system is running at 9 Hz

Review of Machine Vision-Based Electronic Travel Aids

Visual impaired people have navigation and mobility problems on the road. Up to now, many approaches have been conducted to help them navigate around using different sensing techniques. This paper reviews several machine vision- based Electronic Travel Aids (ETAs) and compares them with those using other sensing techniques. The functionalities of machine vision-based ETAs are classified from low-level image processing such as detecting the road regions and obstacles to high-level functionalities such as recognizing the digital tags and texts. In addition, the characteristics of the ETA systems for blind people are particularly discussed

State of the art review on walking support system for visually impaired people

The technology for terrain detection and walking support system for blind people has rapidly been improved the last couple of decades but to assist visually impaired people may have started long ago. Currently, a variety of portable or wearable navigation system is available in the market to help the blind for navigating their way in his local or remote area. The focused category in this work can be subgroups as electronic travel aids (ETAs), electronic orientation aids (EOAs) and position locator devices (PLDs). However, we will focus mainly on electronic travel aids (ETAs). This paper presents a comparative survey among the various portable or wearable walking support systems as well as informative description (a subcategory of ETAs or early stages of ETAs) with its working principal advantages and disadvantages so that the researchers can easily get the current stage of assisting blind technology along with the requirement for optimising the design of walking support system for its users