Face Recognition with Voice Assistance for the Visually Challenged

Abstract

Visually impaired people face a lot of challenges in day-to-day life. Having seen the difficulties faced by them, our primary objective is to facilitate confidence and to empower them to lead a life free from threats related to their safety and well-being. The lack of ability to identify known individuals in the absence of auditory or physical interaction cues drastically limits the visually challenged in their social interactions and poses a threat to their security. Over the past few years many prototype models have been developed to aid this population with the task of face recognition. This application will reduce the inherent difficulty for recognition of a person. It will present a facial recognition application with an intuitive user interface that enables the blind to recognise people and interact socially. The carefully designed interface lets the visually challenged to be able to access and use it without any requirement for visual cues as the users are acquainted by a voice assistant to navigate through the application. The entire build is designed to run efficiently on a Raspberry Pi 3 model B module using the Android Things platform. The Open CV library has been used for the detection and recognition of people in this project. This enables the scope for the software to be run on a multitude of devices such as camera embedded glasses to warn users of their surroundings and identify people to interact safely. Since everything in the application is done in real time with no requirement for prior datasets to be hardcoded it drastically improves the versatility of the software. We hope to make the visually impaired feel closer, comfortable and more secure with the world surrounding them through our application.