Abstract
Visually impaired persons (VIPs) comprise a significant portion of the population and they are present in all corners of the world. In recent times, the technology proved its presence in every domain of life and innovative devices are assisting humans in all fields especially, artificial intelligence has dominated and outperformed the rest of the trades. VIPs need assistance in performing daily life tasks like object/obstacle detection and recognition, navigation, and mobility, particularly in indoor and outdoor environments. Moreover, the protection and safety of these people are of prime concern. Several devices and applications have been developed for the assistance of VIPs. Firstly, these devices take input from the surrounding environment through different sensors e.g. infrared radiation, ultrasonic, imagery sensor, etc. In the second stage, state of the art machine learning techniques process these signals and extract useful information. Finally, feedback is provided to the user through auditory and/or vibratory means. It is observed that most of the existing devices are constrained in their abilities. The paper presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of the state-of-the-art assistive devices for VIPs. These techniques are categorized based on their functionality and working principles. The main attributes, challenges, and limitations of these techniques have also been highlighted. Moreover, a score-based quantitative analysis of these devices is performed to highlight their feature enrichment capability for each category. It may help to select an appropriate device for a particular scenario.
Highlights
T HERE exist around 7.72 billion people in the world [1]
The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section II presents a brief introduction of the assistive devices and the main attributes reflecting the need for visually impaired people
ASSISTIVE DEVICES The assistive devices are available for visually impaired persons (VIPs) to help them in object/ obstacle detection, visualization, localization, recognition, to help in tracking of the area where they are moving or existing, to give them secure mobility for the safety of their lives
Summary
According to the WHO 2020 (World Health Organization) report, all over the world there exist around 2.2 billion people who are visually impaired or blind. Out of this 2.2 billion people, at- least 1 billion have a vision impairment. It has been observed in the past decades that, the number of people who adopted blindness due to some diseases is decreasing because of the preventive measures of the public health. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section II presents a brief introduction of the assistive devices and the main attributes reflecting the need for visually impaired people.
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