A Depth-Based Head-Mounted Visual Display to Aid Navigation in Partially Sighted Individuals

Abstract

Independent navigation for blind individuals can be extremely difficult due to the inability to recognise and avoid obstacles. Assistive techniques such as white canes, guide dogs, and sensory substitution provide a degree of situational awareness by relying on touch or hearing but as yet there are no techniques that attempt to make use of any residual vision that the individual is likely to retain. Residual vision can restricted to the awareness of the orientation of a light source, and hence any information presented on a wearable display would have to limited and unambiguous. For improved situational awareness, i.e. for the detection of obstacles, displaying the size and position of nearby objects, rather than including finer surface details may be sufficient. To test whether a depth-based display could be used to navigate a small obstacle course, we built a real-time head-mounted display with a depth camera and software to detect the distance to nearby objects. Distance was represented as brightness on a low-resolution display positioned close to the eyes without the benefit focussing optics. A set of sighted participants were monitored as they learned to use this display to navigate the course. All were able to do so, and time and velocity rapidly improved with practise with no increase in the number of collisions. In a second experiment a cohort of severely sight-impaired individuals of varying aetiologies performed a search task using a similar low-resolution head-mounted display. The majority of participants were able to use the display to respond to objects in their central and peripheral fields at a similar rate to sighted controls. We conclude that the skill to use a depth-based display for obstacle avoidance can be rapidly acquired and the simplified nature of the display may appropriate for the development of an aid for sight-impaired individuals.

What Do Low-Vision Users Really Want from Smart Glasses? Faces, Text and Perhaps No Glasses at All

“…Google glass has also been used for edge enhancements [8]. Hicks et al [9] explored a device that exploits partially sighted users peripheral vision and adds depth information to nearby objects by making them brighter.…”

Substituição Sensorial Visuo-Tátil e Visuo-Auditiva em Pessoas com Deficiência Visual: uma Revisão Sistemática

“…Segundo Hicks et al (2013) esse dispositivo se propõe a "[...] transformar um mapa de profundidade em uma imagem visível através da conversão de distância em brilho" (p. 3).…”

“…Outros estudos apresentam resultados satisfatórios na eficiência do SSD para o auxílio à locomoção dos usuários (MAIDENBAUM et al, 2013;HICKS et al, 2013;BUCKINGHAM et al, 2015;MAIDENBAUM et al, 2014).…”

Incremental dense semantic stereo fusion for large-scale semantic scene reconstruction

“…5 can be interpreted as filtering. To this end, we apply the transformatioñ (6) in which G m is the Gaussian kernel corresponding to the m th component and ⊗ is the convolution operator.…”

“…1, is a crucial prerequisite for a variety of applications, including robot navigation [1], [2], semantic mapping [3], [4], wearable and/or assistive technology [5], [6], and change detection [7]. However, despite the large body of literature motivated by such applications [3], [4], [8]- [12], most existing approaches suffer from a variety of limitations.…”