Pedestrian Detection with Wearable Cameras for the Blind: A Two-way Perspective

Blind people have limited access to information about their surroundings, which is important for ensuring one's safety, managing social interactions, and identifying approaching pedestrians. With advances in computer vision, wearable cameras can provide equitable access to such information. However, the always-on nature of these assistive technologies poses privacy concerns for parties that may get recorded. We explore this tension from both perspectives, those of sighted passersby and blind users, taking into account camera visibility, in-person versus remote experience, and extracted visual information. We conduct two studies: an online survey with MTurkers (N=206) and an in-person experience study between pairs of blind (N=10) and sighted (N=40) participants, where blind participants wear a working prototype for pedestrian detection and pass by sighted participants. Our results suggest that both of the perspectives of users and bystanders and the several factors mentioned above need to be carefully considered to mitigate potential social tensions.Comment: The 2020 ACM CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI 2020

Ensuring Reliability and Low Cost When Using a Parallel VNF Processing Approach to Embed Delay-Constrained Slices

© 2004-2012 IEEE. Slices were introduced in 5G to enable the co-existence of applications with different requirements on a single infrastructure. Slices may be delay-constrained for mission-critical applications such as Tactile Internet applications. When delay-constrained slices are implemented as collections of virtual network function (VNF) chains, a key challenge is to place the VNFs and route the traffic through the chains to meet a strict delay constraint. Parallel VNF processing has been proposed as a promising approach. However, this approach increases the number of physical nodes in the chains, and thus decreases the reliability, which is also critical for Tactile Internet applications. Furthermore, the cost depends upon the specific VNF placement and traffic routing, as nodes and links are heterogeneous. This article tackles the issues of reliability and cost when embedding delay-constrained slices. We model the problem as an optimization problem that minimizes reliability degradation and cost while ensuring the strict delay constraint when a parallel VNF processing approach is used. Due to the complexity of the formulated problem, we also propose a Tabu search-based algorithm to find sub-optimal solutions. The results indicate that our proposed algorithm can significantly improve cost and reliability while meeting a strict delay constraint