The development of navigation tools for people who are visually impaired had become an important concern in the research area of assistive technologies. This paper gives a comprehensive review of ...different articles published in the area of navigation solutions for people who are visually impaired. Unlike other review papers, this review considers major solutions that work in both the indoor or/and outdoor environments which are based on different technology. From the review, it became clear that the navigation systems proposed for the target users lack some core features that are quite important for independent navigation. Also, there can be instances in which humanitarian conditions also have to be considered in the navigation system design. Based on these findings, a set of recommendations are also given which can be considered in the future design of navigation systems for blind and visually impaired people.
Multimodal interaction refers to situations where users are provided with multiple modes for interacting with systems. Researchers are working on multimodality solutions in several domains. The focus ...of this paper is within the domain of navigation systems for supporting users with visual impairments. Although several literature reviews have covered this domain, none have gone through the research synthesis of multimodal navigation systems. This paper provides a review and analysis of multimodal navigation solutions aimed at people with visual impairments. This review also puts forward recommendations for effective multimodal navigation systems. Moreover, this review also presents the challenges faced during the design, implementation and use of multimodal navigation systems. We call for more research to better understand the users’ evolving modality preferences during navigation.
Navigation assistance is an active research area, where one aim is to foster independent living for people with vision impairments. Despite the fact that many navigation assistants use advanced ...technologies and methods, we found that they did not explicitly address two essential requirements in a navigation assistant - portability and convenience. It is equally imperative in designing a navigation assistant for the visually impaired that the device is portable and convenient to use without much training. Some navigation assistants do not provide users with detailed information about the obstacle types that can be detected, which is essential to make informed decisions when navigating in real-time. To address these gaps, we propose DeepNAVI, a smartphone-based navigation assistant that leverages deep learning competence. Besides providing information about the type of obstacles present, our system can also provide information about their position, distance from the user, motion status, and scene information. All this information is offered to users through audio mode without compromising portability and convenience. With a small model size and rapid inference time, our navigation assistant can be deployed on a portable device such as a smartphone and work seamlessly in a real-time environment. We conducted a pilot test with a user to assess the usefulness and practicality of the system. Our testing results indicate that our system has the potential to be a practical and useful navigation assistant for the visually impaired.
•Portability and convenience are crucial in navigation assistant design.•We propose DeepNAVI, a smartphone navigation assistant for the visually impaired.•DeepNAVI provides information about obstacles and environment to help navigate.•DeepNAVI can be deployed on a portable device and works in real-time.•Tests suggest that DeepNAVI could be helpful for the visually impaired.
Deep learning models have recently gained popularity in the research community due to their high classification success rates. In this paper, we proposed an EfficientNet-Lite based scene recognition ...model for scene recognition as a part of the smartphone-based navigation support application for the blind and visually impaired. We created a custom dataset with both indoor and outdoor scenes for training and testing of the model. The main objective of this work is to support people with visual impairments navigate by providing information about the scene via a smartphone application. The results from the experiment show encouraging performance from the proposed model. As a proof of concept, a prototype app was developed on the Android platform. However, the model can be implemented and deployed in any modern smartphone with good processing power.
Receiving navigation directions and relevant information through appropriate channels is crucial for individuals with visual impairments when they use navigation assistant systems. Various navigation ...assistant systems have implemented diverse methods and modalities to provide navigation instructions to users. Moreover, several studies have examined the preferences of individuals with visual impairments regarding modalities. These studies have primarily relied on surveys or interviews to report their findings. In this study, we extensively investigated the type of navigation information individuals with visual impairments would prefer to receive. To achieve this, we employed a mixed-method design comprising an experiment, a questionnaire, and interviews conducted with participants with visual impairments and individuals with 20/20 vision who were blindfolded. We tested unimodal instruction modes (audio only) and multimodal instruction modes (audio and vibration), along with two types of audio instructions: short and descriptive. To evaluate the participants’ navigation performance, we measured the time taken and errors made during navigation using different instruction types and modes. The findings of this study suggest that the instruction mode does not have any significant effect on the time taken or errors made to complete the trials. Additionally, no evidence was found to support the preference for descriptive instructions over short instructions among the participants. Furthermore, the study did not find evidence to suggest that participants prefer receiving detailed instructions about the environment and obstacles during navigation. It became evident that participants had varying preferences for instruction modes, highlighting the importance of customized functionalities in navigation assistant systems. Moreover, our study validated that participants with visual impairments spent less time and made fewer errors during navigation compared to blindfolded participants with 20/20 vision. We believe that the results of this study will contribute to expanding the understanding of user preferences regarding the type and modality of instructions in the domain of assistive navigation technology.
•Receiving information through appropriate channels is vital for visually impaired.•No significant effect of navigation instruction mode on time taken or errors made.•No evidence participants prefer descriptive instructions over short instructions.•No evidence participants prefer to hear environment details during navigation.•Users prefer personalized options for instruction modes in a navigation assistant.
Due to exponential growth in the Internet technology, there are large amounts of images are available on the Internet. Nowadays, transmission of data is a daily routine and protection of such ...transmitted data is a big problem. Protection can be done with encryption of data or by using data hiding algorithms. Hiding techniques can be used in the environment, where steganographic techniques fail. There are many different protocols and embedding techniques allows us to hide data in a given image. In this article, the authors have analyzed various information hiding techniques.
A Survey on Enhanced Vision of Hazy Images Davis, Magniya; Kuriakose, Bineeth; Paul, Vince
International Journal of Science, Engineering and Computer Technology,
01/2016, Letnik:
6, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Image processing techniques improve the quality of an image or enhance the maximum information from the degraded image. Image dehazing is a technique of enhancing the quality of image from given hazy ...image. It is the process of converting hazy image into a haze free image. Then the resulting image will be more clear and enhanced from the prior. Many development and research is being done in these field areas of computer vision, automatic object detection, image processing, parallel and distributed processing, Robotics and remote sensing. This article reports a detailed study performed over a set of image dehazing algorithms regarding their implementation. The thesis demonstrates the utility and effectiveness of a dehazing techniques.
Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI), computer vision, and smartphone technology have spurred the development of navigation assistants aiming to improve the independent mobility experience of ...people with visual impairments. Still, few studies have explored whether such tools meet this intention. Therefore, this study aimed to examine the perceptions of people with visual impairments on an AI-based navigation assistant and how their perceptions may influence their use of these technologies. A study involving 13 participants was conducted with DeepNAVI, an AI-based smartphone navigation assistant for people with visual impairments in both indoor and outdoor environments. The participants reported mixed reactions towards the navigation assistant, from excitement about the promise of increased independence to a lack of trust and skepticism toward the reliability of this technology. The perceptions from the participants provide some valuable insights about AI-based smartphone navigation assistants and their practicality in real life.
A Review on 2D Image Representation Methods Bineeth Kuriakose; Preena K P
International journal of engineering research & technology (Ahmedabad),
04/2015, Letnik:
4, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Image - in today's digital world represented by numerical numbers. These numbers collectively present abstract concepts that is only understood by human perception. In this paper, we propose a novel ...framework that is more close to human perception of reality to translate the conventional representation of an image. Also, we focus on automating the image representation in terms of a natural language description both understandable by human and machine. The proposed framework can be extended to use a wide variety of real world applications in future.
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