Wearable Real-Time Stereo Vision for the Visually Impaired

— Visually impaired find their navigation difficult as they often lack the needed information for bypassing obstacles and hazards. Electronic Travel Aids (ETAs) are devices that use sensor technology to assist and improve the blind user’s mobility in terms of safety and speed. Modern ETAs does not provide distance information directly and clearly. This paper proposes a method for determining distance using a stereo matching method to help blind individuals for their navigation. The system developed in this work, named Stereo Vision based Electronic Travel Aid (SVETA), consists of a computing device, stereo cameras and stereo earphones, all molded in a helmet. An improved area based stereo matching is performed over the transformed images to calculate dense disparity image. Low texture filter and left/right consistency check are carried out to remove the noises and to highlight the obstacles. A sonification procedure is proposed to map the disparity image to stereo musical sound, wh...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2007
• Where: ENGL
• Authors: G. Balakrishnan, G. Sainarayanan, R. Nagarajan, Sazali Yaacob
• Keywords: Blind User, Electronic Travel Aid, ENGL 2007, Stereo