Simple Smartphone-Based Guiding System for Visually Impaired People

• Main Authors: Bor-Shing Lin, Cheng-Che Lee, Pei-Ying Chiang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2017-06-01
• Series: Sensors
• Subjects: smartphone-based; guiding system; visually impaired; deep learning; obstacle recognition; mobile device application
• Online Access: http://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/17/6/1371

Visually impaired people are often unaware of dangers in front of them, even in familiar environments. Furthermore, in unfamiliar environments, such people require guidance to reduce the risk of colliding with obstacles. This study proposes a simple smartphone-based guiding system for solving the navigation problems for visually impaired people and achieving obstacle avoidance to enable visually impaired people to travel smoothly from a beginning point to a destination with greater awareness of their surroundings. In this study, a computer image recognition system and smartphone application were integrated to form a simple assisted guiding system. Two operating modes, online mode and offline mode, can be chosen depending on network availability. When the system begins to operate, the smartphone captures the scene in front of the user and sends the captured images to the backend server to be processed. The backend server uses the faster region convolutional neural network algorithm or the you only look once algorithm to recognize multiple obstacles in every image, and it subsequently sends the results back to the smartphone. The results of obstacle recognition in this study reached 60%, which is sufficient for assisting visually impaired people in realizing the types and locations of obstacles around them.