EYECane: Naviting with camera embedded white cane for visually impaired person

Jin Sun Ju, Eunjeong Ko and Eun Yi Kim

Eleventh International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility - Posters and Demos (ASSETS 2009)
Pittsburgh, PA, USA, October 26-28, 2009

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Summary

We demonstrate a novel assistive device which can help the visually impaired or blind people to gain more safe mobility, which is called as "EYECane."The EYECane is the white-cane with embedding a camera and a computer. It automatically detects obstacles and recommends some avoidable paths to the user through acoustic interface. For this, it is performed by three steps: In the first step, we classified obstacles or ground based on color appearance. In second step we generate of occupancy grid map of 10 levels. There after the third step, we learn the occupancy grid maps at every paths using neural network. Finally, the proposed system notices auditory sense information about viable paths. To assess the effectiveness of the proposed EYECane, it was tested with 5 users and the results show that it can provide to help blind or visually impaired people to navigate safely and reduce effort pedestrian.

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