Markerless localisation and path planning for the visually impaired

Abstract

A substantial number of people are affected in various ways by visual impairments, most of which have no effective cure. Visually impaired people are presented with a challenging task when navigating through unfamiliar areas, and must depend on additional aids, namely, guide dogs, and any assistance provided by sighted people, thus limiting their independence and privacy. The goal of this study is to exploit the advantages of robust hardware, portability and widespread use of mobile devices to provide a means of guidance to the visually impaired in unfamiliar areas. With the aid of ongoing research being done in the area of computer vision technology, the proposed system will aid the user in identifying the location of the whereabouts while also providing navigation commands to arrive at the desired destination. The prototype was implemented using the client-server architecture, where the server implements both the place recognition module and the path planning module while the client acts as a peripheral device. The evaluation carried out on the implemented prototype gave satisfying results with the place recognition module having a high percentage in both the recall rate and precision. Both the place recognition module and the path planning module returned results in a relatively short period of time.