Wafa Elmannai and Khaled Elleithy's poster on creating a wearable device to assist the visually impaired in increasing their safety and mobility

Elleithy, Khaled M.

Elmannai, Wafa

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Statistics of the visually impairedcommunity 25 million Americans with significantvision loss: costs US ~$51.4 billionannually. There are 285 million visually impairedworldwide, 39 million are blind [1]. There is a growing community: age-related diseases are the leading causesof blindness.The need of the visually impairedcommunity A wearable device can effectivelyensure safety and independent mobilityto the visually impaired people [2].Figure 1: System Architecture Wafa Elmannai and Khaled ElleithyDepartment of Computer science and Engineering University of Bridgeport, Bridgeport, CT MotivationObjectivesCreate a framework that significantly improves the life of visually impaired individually Develop a computer vision method for real time obstacle detecting and avoidingRoute guidance, navigation, and locomotionDevelop an efficient algorithm for data fusion MethodologyHardware Architecture This work consists of two parts : hardwareand software. The hardware design isrepresented in figure 5. The aim of thissoftware part is to develop a data fusionalgorithm among the hardware componentswith help of the computer vision to providean accurate navigational instructions thatensure the safety for the blind’s mobility.After capturing a frame, the fast algorithm is applied to extract interest points within that frame.Since fast algorithm is relatively more expensive to apply on every frame, the Lucas-Kanade opticalflow estimation technique is used to determine motion of vectors. To determine the outliers andinliers, we used RANSAC algorithm to determine the homography. After the separation ofbackground and foreground objects we can apply k-clustering to group interest points together todetermine objects in the picture.ResultsIn this work, we developed a hardware andsoftware implementation that provides aframework for a device that can assist thevisually impaired. The system wasimplemented using a .NET Gadgeteercompatible mainboard and modules fromGHI Electronics.ConclusionFigure 5:  Proposed Hardware DesignFigure 2: Outdoor NavigationFigure 3: Indoor NavigationData Fusion AlgorithmFigure 4: Fusion Algorithm Flowchart[1] https://www.ghielectronics.com/[2] W. Elmannai , K. Elleithy. Sensor-Based Assistive Devices for Visually Impaired People: Current Status, Challenges, and Future Directions. Sensors. (2017).A Highly Accurate and Reliable Data Fusion Framework for Guiding Visually Impaired Performance Evaluation of the Implemented FrameworkReferences User’s RequirementsOur Result ValidationReal Time 0.14sec/ frame with resolution 320 X 240~10 frames/secSatisfied Performance Outdoor/ Indoor Satisfied Detection Range 1m < R < 10m Highly Satisfied Light Weight total weight of all components: 68 gramSatisfiedLow Cost $ 242.41 Satisfied Table1: Evaluation of Most Important Features that Correspond to the User’s needs 

A Highly Accurate and Reliable Data Fusion Framework for Guiding Visually Impaired

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A Highly Accurate and Reliable Data Fusion Framework for Guiding Visually Impaired

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