A Context-Aware Artificial Intelligence-based System to Support Street Crossings For Pedestrians with Visual Impairments

Artificial intelligence has the potential to support and improve the quality of life of people with disabilities. Mobility is a potentially dangerous activity for people with impaired ability. This article presents an assistive technology solution to assist visually impaired pedestrians in safely crossing the street. We use a signal trilateration technique and deep learning (DL) for image processing to segment visually impaired pedestrians from the rest of pedestrians. The system receives information about the presence of a potential user through WiFi signals from a mobile application installed on the user’s phone. The software runs on an intelligent semaphore originally designed and installed to improve urban mobility in a smart city context. This solution can communicate with users, interpret the traffic situation, and make the necessary adjustments (with the semaphore’s capabilities) to ensure a safe street crossing. The proposed system has been implemented in Maringá, Brazil, for a one-year period. Trial tests carried out with visually impaired pedestrians confirm its feasibility and practicality in a real-life environment

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

Outdoor Localization Using BLE RSSI and Accessible Pedestrian Signals for the Visually Impaired at Intersections

One of the major challenges for blind and visually impaired (BVI) people is traveling safely to cross intersections on foot. Many countries are now generating audible signals at crossings for visually impaired people to help with this problem. However, these accessible pedestrian signals can result in confusion for visually impaired people as they do not know which signal must be interpreted for traveling multiple crosses in complex road architecture. To solve this problem, we propose an assistive system called CAS (Crossing Assistance System) which extends the principle of the BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy) RSSI (Received Signal Strength Indicator) signal for outdoor and indoor location tracking and overcomes the intrinsic limitation of outdoor noise to enable us to locate the user effectively. We installed the system on a real-world intersection and collected a set of data for demonstrating the feasibility of outdoor RSSI tracking in a series of two studies. In the first study, our goal was to show the feasibility of using outdoor RSSI on the localization of four zones. We used a k-nearest neighbors (kNN) method and showed it led to 99.8% accuracy. In the second study, we extended our work to a more complex setup with nine zones, evaluated both the kNN and an additional method, a Support Vector Machine (SVM) with various RSSI features for classification. We found that the SVM performed best using the RSSI average, standard deviation, median, interquartile range (IQR) of the RSSI over a 5 s window. The best method can localize people with 97.7% accuracy. We conclude this paper by discussing how our system can impact navigation for BVI users in outdoor and indoor setups and what are the implications of these findings on the design of both wearable and traffic assistive technology for blind pedestrian navigation

Improving pedestrian’s crosswalk accessibility through digital fencing

One of the major challenges for visually impaired people is to walk safely in any urban landscape. Modern cities are using passive solutions, like audible signals, to promote the security of that pedestrians. However, these solutions may be insufficient to provide the relevant information about the traffic flow, and the length of the crosswalk among many other questions. Smart crosswalks can improve the access to such information by providing a way for the user to share data with them. This paper addresses this question by presenting the VALLPASS project that aims to develop a smart pedestrians crosswalk that, besides other design requirements, aims to promote accessibility by sharing local traffic data with the user. Besides that, pedestrian security will be tackled by defining a digital protecting fence based on the user location obtained from the RSSI values between two beacons and the user’s smartphone. Details behind its operation and the overall functionality of a custom-made app will be provided.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Improving accessibility for pedestrian crosswalks using digital fencing

Mestrado de dupla diplomação com Universidade Tecnológica NacionalThe exponential growth of urban populations has put in agenda the need of cities to become more sustainable. The concept of Smart Cities can be an important part for the solution to this problem. One of the elements that can be found in this paradigm are smart crosswalks. Smart crosswalks can improve the access to such information by providing a way for the user to share data with them. Although they have many advantages, it is still difficult to adequately support people who are blind or visually impaired when they are crossing the street. The VALLPASS project developed a smart pedestrians crosswalk that, besides other design requirements, aims to promote accessibility by sharing local traffic data with the user. This thesis addresses this problem by presenting the development of a system that aims to provide a solution to promote accessibility of visually impaired citizens through the implementation of a digital fencing based on the user location obtained from the Received Signal Strength Indicator (RSSI) values between two beacons and the user’s smartphone. That in a future could be integrated into the VALLPASS solution. In order to explore this solution it was developed a custom-made application in Android, and it was used an ESP32 as a Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) Beacon.El crecimiento exponencial de las poblaciones urbanas ha puesto en la agenda la necesidad de que las ciudades se vuelvan más sostenibles. El concepto de Ciudades Inteligentes puede ser una parte importante de la solución a este problema. Uno de los elementos que se pueden encontrar en este paradigma son los cruces peatonales inteligentes. Los cruces de peatones inteligentes pueden mejorar el acceso a dicha información al proporcionar una forma para que el usuario comparta datos con ellos. Aunque tienen muchas ventajas, todavía es difícil brindar un apoyo adecuado a las personas ciegas o con discapacidad visual cuando cruzan la calle. El proyecto VALLPASS desarrolló un cruce de peatones inteligente que, además de otros requisitos de diseño, tiene como objetivo promover la accesibilidad al compartir datos de tráfico local con el usuario. Esta tesis aborda este problema al presentar el desarrollo de un sistema que tiene como objetivo brindar una solución para promover la accesibilidad de los ciudadanos con discapacidad visual a través de la implementación de un cercado digital basado en la ubicación del usuario obtenida a partir de los valores de RSSI entre dos balizas y el teléfono del usuario. Para explorar esta solución, se desarrolló una aplicación personalizada en Android y se utilizó un ESP32 como baliza BLE

Defining Traffic Scenarios for the Visually Impaired

For the development of a transfer concept of camera-based object detections from Advanced Driver Assistance Systems to the assistance of the visually impaired, we define relevant traffic scenarios and vision use cases by means of problem-centered interviews with four experts and ten members of the target group. We identify the six traffic scenarios: general orientation, navigating to an address, crossing a road, obstacle avoidance, boarding a bus, and at the train station clustered into the three categories: Orientation, Pedestrian, and Public Transport. Based on the data, we describe each traffic scenario and derive a summarizing table adapted from software engineering resulting in a collection of vision use cases. The ones that are also of interest in Advanced Driver Assistance Systems – Bicycle, Crosswalk, Traffic Sign, Traffic Light (State), Driving Vehicle, Obstacle, and Lane Detection – build the foundation of our future work. Furthermore, we present social insights that we gained from the interviews and discuss the indications we gather by considering the importance of the identified use cases for each interviewed member of the target group

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