Visually Impaired People Positioning Assistance System Using Artificial Intelligence

Abstract

Blindness and visual impairment are commonly associated with social and functional limitations, almost 45 million people in the world have blindness, and 135 million have any visual impairment. This condition has a significant impact on the quality of life and brings many challenges to the individual, one of which is the navigation and positioning tasks. Although there are already apps capable of helping visually impaired people for mobility purposes, most of them focus on detecting obstacles and, therefore, on avoiding dangerous situations. However, mobility of visually impaired people involves many more tasks, such as knowing their exact position and staying informed along an entire route. For this purpose, a standalone and customizable solution is proposed that uses traditional visual recognition of landmarks to process the surroundings of the current location of the visually impaired person using a smartphone and informing about the nearby places assuring the user a sense of the site. For feature detection, it was used the Oriented FAST and Rotated BRIEF (ORB) algorithm, and for feature matching, it was used the brute-force method with the k-nearest neighbors (KNN) algorithm. Results show that the proposed solution can analyze pictures in fractions of a second with satisfactory accuracy.