Sonification of guidance data during road crossing for people with visual impairments or blindness

Abstract

In the last years several solutions were proposed to support people with visual impairments or blindness during road crossing. These solutions focus on computer vision techniques for recognizing pedestrian crosswalks and computing their relative position from the user. Instead, this contribution addresses a different problem; the design of an auditory interface that can effectively guide the user during road crossing. Two original auditory guiding modes based on data sonification are presented and compared with a guiding mode based on speech messages.Experimental evaluation shows that there is no guiding mode that is best suited for all test subjects. The average time to align and cross is not significantly different among the three guiding modes, and test subjects 1 arXiv:1506.07272v1 [cs.HC] 24 Jun 2015 distribute their preferences for the best guiding mode almost uniformly among the three solutions. From the experiments it also emerges that higher effort is necessary for decoding the sonified instructions if compared to the speech instructions, and that test subjects require frequent 'hints' (in the form of speech messages). Despite this, more than 2/3 of test subjects prefer one of the two guiding modes based on sonification. There are two main reasons for this: firstly, with speech messages it is harder to hear the sound of the environment, and secondly sonified messages convey information about the "quantity" of the expected movement.

Exploring physical attributes of walkability from perspective of blind pedestrians

“…The other experiments have been also implemented for capturing the PWDs behavior, such as, walking speed of VIPs [3], stair evacuation speed [4], doorways capacity by considering PWDs and elderly people ( [5]). The specific research relating to the blind and VIP is also conducted, which is mainly focused on the autonomously navigation, such as, accessible smartphones for blind user [6], Acoustic way finding [7], ZebraRecognizer [8], traffic lights detection on smartphones [9], and sonification of guidance data [10].…”

Robust traffic lights detection on mobile devices for pedestrians with visual impairment

“…In the field of pedestrian crossings, the problem of guiding people with VIB has been specifically addressed by Mascetti et at. [18].…”

“…Constants: g, y and r represent the three optical unit colors (i.e., green, yellow and red). Method: 3: {Extraction of candidate AOU} 4: i ← apply f c to i {i is a binary image} 5: O ← extract the set of contours from i 6: for all (contour o ∈ O) do 7: {Pruning of candidate AOU} 8: o ← rotate o by the inverse of the inclination of h 9: if (o does not satisfy "distance" or "width" properties) then 10: continue {prune o} 11: end if 12: {Validation} 13: p ← image patch, extract from i, corresponding to the MBR of o 14: p ← resize p to have the same size of t c 15: α is the result of normalized cross correlation between t c and p 16: if (α > T ) then add o, c to R 17: end for 18: end for…”

Towards a Natural User Interface to Support People with Visual Impairments in Detecting Colors

“…Sonification could be used as the sole audio feedback method, or in conjunction with speech information. A similar approach has been followed by the same team when working with a navigational task [2]. This will allow the user to distinguish between a continuous range of colors, rather than a discrete one.…”

“…There are indeed many commercial applications, as well as research projects, aimed at supporting visually impaired people in their everyday tasks. Among others applications, some support outdoor orientation and independent mobility (commercial applications like AriadneGPS 4 , iMove 5 and many research projects [1][2][3][4][5][6]), others help recognising objects (like AudioLabels 6 ) or sources of lights (like the commercial application LightDetector 7 ). In this paper we consider the problem of detecting the color of items (e.g.…”