How to navigate safely, recognize encountered obstacles, and move independently from one location to another in unknown environments are some of the challenges that face visually impaired people. By proposing a solution towards overcoming these challenges, this work will be of most importance to visually impaired people. In this work, we propose a consistent, reliable and robust smartphone-based method to classify obstacles in unknown environments from partial visual information based on computer vision and machine learning techniques. Our proposed method handles high levels of noise and bad resolution in frames captured from a phone camera. In addition, our proposed method offers maximum flexibility to users and use the least expensive equipment possible. Moreover, by leveraging on deep-learning techniques, the proposed method enables semantic categorization in order to classify obstacles and increase the awareness of the explored environment. The efficiency of the work has been experimentally measured on a variety of experiments studies on different complex scenes. It records high accuracy of [90.2 % ]. INDEX TERMS Image analysis, image classification, supervised learning, mobile applications.

Affective computing aims to create smart systems able to interact emotionally with users. For effective affective computing experiences, emotions should be detected accurately. The emotion influences appear in all the modalities of humans, such as the facial expression, voice, and body language, as well as in the different bio-parameters of the agents, such as the electro-dermal activity (EDA), the respiration patterns, the skin conductance, and the temperature as well as the brainwaves, which is called electroencephalography (EEG). This review provides an overview of the emotion recognition process, its methodology, and methods. It also explains the EEG-based emotion recognition as an example of emotion recognition methods demonstrating the required steps starting from capturing the EEG signals during the emotion elicitation process, then feature extraction using different techniques, such as empirical mode decomposition technique (EMD) and variational mode decomposition technique (VMD). Finally, emotion classification using different classifiers including the support vector machine (SVM) and deep neural network (DNN) is also highlighted.

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