Abstract
A major challenge faced by the blind and visually impaired population is that of wayfinding--the ability of a person to find his or her way to a given destination. We propose a new wayfinding aid based on a camera cell phone, which is held by the user to find and read aloud specially designed machine-readable signs, which we call color targets, in indoor environments (labeling locations such as offices and restrooms). Our main technical innovation is that we have designed the color targets to be detected and located in fractions of a second on the cell phone CPU, even at a distance of several meters. Once the sign has been quickly detected, nearby information in the form of a barcode can be read, an operation that typically requires more computational time. An important contribution of this paper is a principled method for optimizing the design of the color targets and the color target detection algorithm based on training data, instead of relying on heuristic choices as in our previous work. We have implemented the system on Nokia 7610 cell phone, and preliminary experiments with blind subjects demonstrate the feasibility of using the system as a real-time wayfinding aid.
Highlights
There are nearly 1 million legally blind persons in the United States, and up to 10 millions with significant visual impairments
We propose a new assistive technology system to aid in wayfinding based on a camera cell phone, which is held by the user to find and read aloud specially designed signs in the environment
The notion of distinctiveness is clearly related to the false positive rate (FPR), which can be estimated over a representative set of images that do not contain any targets
Summary
There are nearly 1 million legally blind persons in the United States, and up to 10 millions with significant visual impairments. We propose a new assistive technology system to aid in wayfinding based on a camera cell phone (see Figure 1), which is held by the user to find and read aloud specially designed signs in the environment. These signs consist of barcodes placed adjacent to special landmark symbols. Our proposed system, which we have already prototyped, has the advantage of using standard off-the-shelf cell phone technology— which is inexpensive, portable, multipurpose, and becoming nearly ubiquitous—and simple color signs which can be produced on a standard color printer. Preliminary experiments with blind subjects demonstrate the feasibility of using the system as a real-time wayfinding aid (see Section 4)
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