Situation-based indoor wayfinding system for the visually impaired

Abstract

This paper presents an indoor wayfinding system to help the visually impaired finding their way to a given destination in an unfamiliar environment. The main novelty is the use of the user"s situation as the basis for designing color codes to explain the environmental information and for developing the wayfinding system to detect and recognize such color codes. Actually, people would require different information according to their situations. Therefore, situation-based color codes are designed, including location-specific codes and guide codes. These color codes are affixed in certain locations to provide information to the visually impaired, and their location and meaning are then recognized using the proposed wayfinding system. Consisting of three steps, the proposed wayfinding system first recognizes the current situation using a vocabulary tree that is built on the shape properties of images taken of various situations. Next, it detects and recognizes the necessary codes according to the current situation, based on color and edge information. Finally, it provides the user with environmental information and their path through an auditory interface. To assess the validity of the proposed wayfinding system, we have conducted field test with four visually impaired, then the results showed that they can find the optimal path in real-time with an accuracy of 95%.

"Pray before you step out"

“…While the adoption of navigation technology among people with visual impairments suggests that such technologies are helpful, we still have limited understanding of how people choose navigation technologies and use them in their everyday lives. navigation technologies to support blind users, but most prior research focuses on a singular viewpoint, whether the sensory output method (e.g., sound [16]), navigation scenario (e.g., unfamiliar indoor environment [9]), or suitability of specific technology (e.g., smartphone accelerometers [4]). Absent in this work are the role that individual differences play in choosing and using navigation technology; we should expect that people with vision impairments are individuals, with individual preferences, and not simply an aggregate collection of users.…”

Interacción humano-computador en escenarios educativos y artísticos. Kinect como propuesta viable

“…Herramientas y facilidades para la navegación, retroalimentación y personalización del ambiente son fundamentales en situaciones como las descritas. Existen iniciativas de considerable peso y con trabajo constante que buscan determinar las principales necesidades y las mejores alternativas de solución en escenarios como los descritos [8,17,18].…”

A smart handheld device navigation system based on detecting visual code

“…The algorithm is very fast and robust, but the target can't encode infonnation, and is vulnerable to rotate. Ko et al proposed another kind of color target [4], shows in Figure. 2. They used two kinds of color targets.…”

“…The basic idea about Zhang's method is to deal with the transfonnation between 3D and 2D world, as the following equation (4). [ R I T] is called the extrinsic matrix, and A is the intrinsic matrix.…”