A Navigation Guide for Visually Impaired Person

Abstract

Visually impaired people face problems in navigation in an unknown environment. There are many portable devices and technologies to enhance the blind persons movement. Technology has already replaced the traditional methods like simple guiding canes with GPS based voice help, intelligent canes with inbuilt detectors and QR codes to name a few. This advancement in technology helps visually impaired people to achieve independence. This research developed an android based application for assisting blind people in navigation in any indoor or outdoor environment using a pre-generated map, GPS for self localization and vision based algorithms. The work makes use of Google voice recognition to acquire user voice input for the navigator system. Visual data acquired using the mobile camera is processed and analyzed for destination environment survey. To implement this functionality, application creates a SVM (Support Vector Machine) and train data set onto four categories like “Close Door”, “Open Door”, “Person Present”and “Others”. To implement support vector machine, the application uses OpenCV android SDK. Experimental results further demonstrate the working of application. The application allows to identify destination’s environment with an accuracy of 82.5 %.