Assistive guidance system for the visually impaired
Author and article information
Abstract
In recent years, with the improvement in imaging technology, the quality of small cameras have significantly improved. Coupled with the introduction of credit-card sized single-board computers such as Raspberry Pi, it is now possible to integrate a small camera with a wearable computer. This paper aims to develop a low cost product, using a webcam and Raspberry Pi, for visually-impaired people, which can assist them in detecting and recognising pedestrian crosswalks and staircases. There are two steps involved in detection and recognition of the obstacles i.e pedestrian crosswalks and staircases. In detection algorithm, we extract Haar features from the video frames and push these features to our Haar classifier. In recognition algorithm, we first convert the RGB image to HSV and apply histogram equalization to make the pixel intensity uniform. This is followed by image segmentation and contour detection. These detected contours are passed through a pre-processor which extracts the region of interests (ROI). We applied different statistical methods on these ROI to differentiate between staircases and pedestrian crosswalks. The detection and recognition results on our datasets demonstrate the effectiveness of our system.
Cite this as
2017. Assistive guidance system for the visually impaired. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3410v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3410v1Author comment
This is a preprint submission to PeerJ Preprints.
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Competing Interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Author Contributions
Rohit Takhar conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, performed the computation work, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Tushar Sharma conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, performed the computation work, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Udit Arora conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, performed the computation work, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Sohit Verma conceived and designed the experiments, performed the experiments, analyzed the data, contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools, wrote the paper, prepared figures and/or tables, performed the computation work, reviewed drafts of the paper.
Data Deposition
The following information was supplied regarding data availability:
The code is proprietary, and cannot be shared publicly at this time. Further, this submission is for preprint only.
Funding
The authors received no funding for this work.
