Up to now, biometric recognition has shown significant advantages as to be considered a reliable solution for security systems in mobile environments. Nevertheless, due to the short lifetime of ...biometrics in mobile devices, a handful of concerns regarding usability and accessibility need to be covered in order to meet users’ requirements. This work is focused on analysing the usability and accessibility of a face recognition system used by visually impaired people, focusing on the time spent in the process, which is a critical aspect. Specifically, we cover different key questions including which kind of feedback is more useful for visually impaired users and beneficial for performance and how is the performance evolution in contrast with the time spent in the recognition. Our findings suggest that several parameters improve along with the time spent in the process, including performance. The audio feedback provided in real time involves also better performance and user experience than instructions given previously.
The information explosion era provides the foundation for a technological solution to enable the visually impaired to more independent living in the community. This paper first provides a review of ...assistive technologies for visually impaired people. Current technology allows applications to be efficiently distributed and operated on mobile and handheld devices. Thus, this paper also summarizes recent developments of assistive technologies in mobile interaction. It then presents the Wireless Intelligent Assistive Navigation Management System Using SmartGuide Devices for visually impaired people. The “SmartGuide” of the system is built as a standalone portable handheld device. The system is to assist blind and low vision people to walk around independently especially in dynamic changing environments. It also includes a camera sensor network to enhance monitoring capabilities for an extra level of security and reliability. Finally, the paper presents an improved system with some new designs involving mobile interaction.
Spatial cognition of visually handicapped people has clarified and walking environment for them has been improved. However, the pedestrian spaces of present condition are still highly constrained for ...them. A spiral ramp is one of them. Therefore, we surveyed the spatial cognition of visually handicapped people on a spiral ramp. In this study, in order to clarify the characteristics of their spatial cognition and search behavior, experiments were carried out in 14 kinds of courses on a spiral ramp. Subjects were visually handicapped people and eye-masked people with ordinary vision. The search behavior of the two is compared and analyzed by walking locus and observation; and the spatial cognition, by interview and bservation.
In this paper, we propose a novel approach in assistive devices for visually impaired people, named Virtual Eye. The idea is to allow the blind person to feel the world around him in a form of a 3D ...textured map in a handheld device, and move/react accordingly. To realize this idea, three technologies are to be integrated, Project Tango by Google, E-sense by Senseg, and RFID. We envision that Virtual Eye will get the world in the hands of the blind people, and hence, improve the quality of their life.
The information about the environment and the precise guidance of visually impaired people is the basis for their safe movement of the traffic network. Therefore, the information and communication ...services should be adapted to this group of users. The services based on the advanced information and communication technologies provide the visually impaired persons with information about the environment while moving along the traffic network. This paper analyses the currently available information systems of users when moving traffic network, and the currently most services based on new ICT (Information and Communications Technology). The analysis was carried on a representative sample of the City of Zagreb (Croatia) in involving all interest groups of visually impaired people. Based on defined user requirements is proposed a new services based on NFC (Near Field Communication) and RTLS (Real-Time Locating Systems). Testing and analysing the efficiency of single information and communication technologies have been performed on the actual traffic network system of the City of Zagreb. The users of the Croatian Society for Promotion and Development of Tiphlotechnology (Hrvatska Udruga za Promicanje i Razvoj Tiflotehnike - HUPRT,
http://www.huprt.hr
) participated in checking the efficiency of single technologies and services.
The authors address, in this study, a new adaptive binarisation method on images captured by smartphones. This work is part of an application for visually impaired people assistance, which aims at ...making text information accessible to people who cannot read it. The main advantage of the proposed method is that the windows underlying the local thresholding process are automatically adapted to the image content. This avoids the problematic parameter setting of local thresholding approaches, difficult to adapt to a heterogeneous database. The adaptive windows are extracted based on ultimate opening (a morphological operator) and then used as thresholding windows to perform a local Otsu's algorithm. The authors’ method is evaluated and compared with the Niblack, Sauvola, Wolf, toggle mapping morphological segmentation (TMMS) and maximally stable extremal regions methods on a new challenging database introduced by them. Their database is acquired by visually impaired people in real conditions. It contains 4000 annotated characters (available online for research purposes). Experiments show that the proposed method outperforms classical binarisation methods for degraded images such as low-contrasted or blurred images, very common in their application.
According to estimates by the World Health Organization, about 285 million people suffer from some kind of visual disability, of whom 39 million are blind, resulting in 0.7% of the world population. ...Computer vision techniques and image analysis can help improve visually-impaired people. In this project, a system that allows for facial recognition and detection of spoofing adapted to the needs of disabled people is proposed, implemented and validated. The architecture has been carefully selected and subsequently implemented following an innovative facial normalization algorithm in order to increase both the recognition rate of facial identification and spoofing detection. The information provided to the user is composed by the name of the person identified and whether it is real or fake image (photograph). This information is provided by means of a text-to-speech tool. This architecture can be integrated into video door-phone installations (videointercom installations), devices with reduced computing capabilities or the users´ mobile phones. The architecture has been validated in a real environment with both real users and printed images achieving very good results.
In this paper a navigational aid for visually impaired people is presented. The system uses a RGB-D camera to perceive the environment and implements self-localization, obstacle detection and ...obstacle classification. The novelty of this work is threefold. First, self-localization is performed by means of a novel camera tracking approach that uses both depth and color information. Second, to provide the user with semantic information, obstacles are classified as walls, doors, steps and a residual class that covers isolated objects and bumpy parts on the floor. Third, in order to guarantee real time performance, the system is accelerated by offloading parallel operations to the GPU. Experiments demonstrate that the whole system is running at 9 Hz.
Living and learning with blind children Harrison, Felicity; Crow, Mary
Living and learning with blind children,
c1993, 1993, 19930325, 1993-03-25
eBook, Book
Parents and preschool teachers of visually impaired children will find this a welcome guide to coping with day-to-day challenges and enhancing the child's education and development.
Obstacle detection and warning can improve the mobility as well as the safety of visually impaired people specially in unfamiliar environments. For this, firstly, obstacles are detected and localized ...and then the information of the obstacles will be sent to the visually impaired people by using different modalities such as voice, tactile, vibration. In this paper, we present an assistive system for visually impaired people based on the matrix of electrode and a mobile Kinect. This system consists of two main components: environment information acquisition and analysis and information representation. The first component aims at capturing the environment by using a mobile Kinect and analyzing it in order to detect the predefined obstacles for visually impaired people, while the second component tries to represent obstacle’s information under the form of electrode matrix.
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