Unifying terrain awareness for the visually impaired through real-time semantic segmentation.

Navigational assistance aims to help visually-impaired people to ambulate the environment safely and independently. This topic becomes challenging as it requires detecting a wide variety of scenes to provide higher level assistive awareness. Vision-based technologies with monocular detectors or depth sensors have sprung up within several years of research. These separate approaches have achieved remarkable results with relatively low processing time and have improved the mobility of impaired people to a large extent. However, running all detectors jointly increases the latency and burdens the computational resources. In this paper, we put forward seizing pixel-wise semantic segmentation to cover navigation-related perception needs in a unified way. This is critical not only for the terrain awareness regarding traversable areas, sidewalks, stairs and water hazards, but also for the avoidance of short-range obstacles, fast-approaching pedestrians and vehicles. The core of our unification proposal is a deep architecture, aimed at attaining efficient semantic understanding. We have integrated the approach in a wearable navigation system by incorporating robust depth segmentation. A comprehensive set of experiments prove the qualified accuracy over state-of-the-art methods while maintaining real-time speed. We also present a closed-loop field test involving real visually-impaired users, demonstrating the effectivity and versatility of the assistive framework

SLAM for Visually Impaired People: A Survey

In recent decades, several assistive technologies for visually impaired and blind (VIB) people have been developed to improve their ability to navigate independently and safely. At the same time, simultaneous localization and mapping (SLAM) techniques have become sufficiently robust and efficient to be adopted in the development of assistive technologies. In this paper, we first report the results of an anonymous survey conducted with VIB people to understand their experience and needs; we focus on digital assistive technologies that help them with indoor and outdoor navigation. Then, we present a literature review of assistive technologies based on SLAM. We discuss proposed approaches and indicate their pros and cons. We conclude by presenting future opportunities and challenges in this domain.Comment: 26 pages, 5 tables, 3 figure

Wearable obstacle avoidance electronic travel aids for blind and visually impaired individuals : a systematic review

Background Wearable obstacle avoidance electronic travel aids (ETAs) have been developed to assist the safe displacement of blind and visually impaired individuals (BVIs) in indoor/outdoor spaces. This systematic review aimed to understand the strengths and weaknesses of existing ETAs in terms of hardware functionality, cost, and user experience. These elements may influence the usability of the ETAs and are valuable in guiding the development of superior ETAs in the future. Methods Formally published studies designing and developing the wearable obstacle avoidance ETAs were searched for from six databases from their inception to April 2023. The PRISMA 2020 and APISSER guidelines were followed. Results Eighty-nine studies were included for analysis, 41 of which were judged to be of moderate to high quality. Most wearable obstacle avoidance ETAs mainly depend on camera- and ultrasonic-based techniques to achieve perception of the environment. Acoustic feedback was the most common human-computer feedback form used by the ETAs. According to user experience, the efficacy and safety of the device was usually their primary concern. Conclusions Although many conceptualised ETAs have been designed to facilitate BVIs' independent navigation, most of these devices suffer from shortcomings. This is due to the nature and limitations of the various processors, environment detection techniques and human-computer feedback those ETAs are equipped with. Integrating multiple techniques and hardware into one ETA is a way to improve performance, but there is still a need to address the discomfort of wearing the device and the high-cost. Developing an applicable systematic review guideline along with a credible quality assessment tool for these types of studies is also required. © 2013 IEEE

Enhancing perception for the visually impaired with deep learning techniques and low-cost wearable sensors

As estimated by the World Health Organization, there are millions of people who lives with some form of vision impairment. As a consequence, some of them present mobility problems in outdoor environments. With the aim of helping them, we propose in this work a system which is capable of delivering the position of potential obstacles in outdoor scenarios. Our approach is based on non-intrusive wearable devices and focuses also on being low-cost. First, a depth map of the scene is estimated from a color image, which provides 3D information of the environment. Then, an urban object detector is in charge of detecting the semantics of the objects in the scene. Finally, the three-dimensional and semantic data is summarized in a simpler representation of the potential obstacles the users have in front of them. This information is transmitted to the user through spoken or haptic feedback. Our system is able to run at about 3.8 fps and achieved a 87.99% mean accuracy in obstacle presence detection. Finally, we deployed our system in a pilot test which involved an actual person with vision impairment, who validated the effectiveness of our proposal for improving its navigation capabilities in outdoors.This work has been supported by the Spanish Government TIN2016-76515R Grant, supported with Feder funds, the University of Alicante project GRE16-19, and by the Valencian Government project GV/2018/022. Edmanuel Cruz is funded by a Panamenian grant for PhD studies IFARHU & SENACYT 270-2016-207. This work has also been supported by a Spanish grant for PhD studies ACIF/2017/243. Thanks also to Nvidia for the generous donation of a Titan Xp and a Quadro P6000

Solar-Powered Deep Learning-Based Recognition System of Daily Used Objects and Human Faces for Assistance of the Visually Impaired

This paper introduces a novel low-cost solar-powered wearable assistive technology (AT) device, whose aim is to provide continuous, real-time object recognition to ease the finding of the objects for visually impaired (VI) people in daily life. The system consists of three major components: a miniature low-cost camera, a system on module (SoM) computing unit, and an ultrasonic sensor. The first is worn on the user’s eyeglasses and acquires real-time video of the nearby space. The second is worn as a belt and runs deep learning-based methods and spatial algorithms which process the video coming from the camera performing objects’ detection and recognition. The third assists on positioning the objects found in the surrounding space. The developed device provides audible descriptive sentences as feedback to the user involving the objects recognized and their position referenced to the user gaze. After a proper power consumption analysis, a wearable solar harvesting system, integrated with the developed AT device, has been designed and tested to extend the energy autonomy in the dierent operating modes and scenarios. Experimental results obtained with the developed low-cost AT device have demonstrated an accurate and reliable real-time object identification with an 86% correct recognition rate and 215 ms average time interval (in case of high-speed SoM operating mode) for the image processing. The proposed system is capable of recognizing the 91 objects oered by the Microsoft Common Objects in Context (COCO) dataset plus several custom objects and human faces. In addition, a simple and scalable methodology for using image datasets and training of Convolutional Neural Networks (CNNs) is introduced to add objects to the system and increase its repertory. It is also demonstrated that comprehensive trainings involving 100 images per targeted object achieve 89% recognition rates, while fast trainings with only 12 images achieve acceptable recognition rates of 55%

A Systematic Review of Urban Navigation Systems for Visually Impaired People

Blind and Visually impaired people (BVIP) face a range of practical difficulties when undertaking outdoor journeys as pedestrians. Over the past decade, a variety of assistive devices have been researched and developed to help BVIP navigate more safely and independently. In~addition, research in overlapping domains are addressing the problem of automatic environment interpretation using computer vision and machine learning, particularly deep learning, approaches. Our aim in this article is to present a comprehensive review of research directly in, or relevant to, assistive outdoor navigation for BVIP. We breakdown the navigation area into a series of navigation phases and tasks. We then use this structure for our systematic review of research, analysing articles, methods, datasets and current limitations by task. We also provide an overview of commercial and non-commercial navigation applications targeted at BVIP. Our review contributes to the body of knowledge by providing a comprehensive, structured analysis of work in the domain, including the state of the art, and guidance on future directions. It will support both researchers and other stakeholders in the domain to establish an informed view of research progress

An overview of machine learning and 5G for people with disabilities

Currently, over a billion people, including children (or about 15% of the world’s population), are estimated to be living with disability, and this figure is going to increase to beyond two billion by 2050. People with disabilities generally experience poorer levels of health, fewer achievements in education, fewer economic opportunities, and higher rates of poverty. Artificial intelligence and 5G can make major contributions towards the assistance of people with disabilities, so they can achieve a good quality of life. In this paper, an overview of machine learning and 5G for people with disabilities is provided. For this purpose, the proposed 5G network slicing architecture for disabled people is introduced. Different application scenarios and their main benefits are considered to illustrate the interaction of machine learning and 5G. Critical challenges have been identified and addressed.This work has been supported by the Agencia Estatal de Investigación of Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación of Spain under project PID2019-108713RB-C51 MCIN/ AEI /10.13039/501100011033.Postprint (published version