Skip to main content

An Electronic Travel Aid to Assist Blind and Visually Impaired People to Avoid Obstacles

  • Conference paper
  • First Online:
Book cover Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns (CAIP 2015)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 9257))

Included in the following conference series:

Abstract

When devices and applications provide assistance to people they become part of assistive technology. If the assistance is given to impaired people, then it is possible to refer those technologies as adaptive technologies. The main aims of these systems are substitution of physical assistants and the improvement of typical tools already available for impaired people. In this paper some benefits and examples of adaptive technology applications will be discussed. Moreover we present an adaptive technology framework to avoid obstacles to be exploited by visually impaired and blind people. The proposed assistive technology has been designed to perform vision substitution; specifically it provides Electronic Travel Aid (ETA) capabilities through the processing of information acquired with a depth sensor such that the user can avoid obstacles during the environment exploration. In the proposed system we require to know just the height of the sensor with respect to the ground floor to calibrate the ETA system. Experiments are performed to asses the proposed system.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 39.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 54.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

Preview

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.

References

  1. Stanco, F., Buffa, M., Farinella, G.M.: Automatic Braille to Black Conversion. In: Baldoni, M., Baroglio, C., Boella, G., Micalizio, R. (eds.) AI*IA 2013. LNCS, vol. 8249, pp. 517–526. Springer, Heidelberg (2013)

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  2. Website of OrCam wearable adaptive technology device for visually impaired people. (last visited on April 1, 2015). http://www.orcam.com/

  3. Kanade, T.: Quality of life technology [scanning the issue]. Proceedings of the IEEE 100(8), 2394–2396 (2012)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Website of the World Health Organization. (Updated august 2014, last visited on June 11, 2015). http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs282/en/

  5. Dakopoulos, D., Bourbakis, N.G.: Wearable obstacle avoidance electronic travel aids for blind: A survey. IEEE Transaction on Systems, Man, and Cybernetics-Part C: Applications and Reviews 40(1) (January 2010)

    Google Scholar 

  6. Italian website of International Agency for the Prevention of Blindness (Published April 2009, last updated August 2014, last visited on June 11, 2015). http://www.iapb.it/news2.php?ozim=54

  7. Terven, J.R., Salas, J., Raducanu, B.: New opportunities for computer vision-based assistive technology systems for the visually impaired. Computer 47(4), 52–58 (2014)

    Article  Google Scholar 

  8. Meijer, P.B.L.: An experimental system for auditory image representations. IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Engineering 39 (February 1992)

    Google Scholar 

  9. Aguerrevere, D., Choudhury, M., Barreto, A.: Portable 3d sound / sonar navigation system for blind individuals. In: Second LACCEI International Latin American and Caribbean Conference for Engineering and Technology (June 2004)

    Google Scholar 

  10. Spanish website of Espacio Acstico Virtual (Virtual Acoustic Space) (last visited on April 1, 2015). http://www.iac.es/proyecto/eavi/

  11. Vera, P., Zenteno, D., Salas, J.: A smartphone-based virtual white cane. Pattern Analysis and Applications 17 (August 2014)

    Google Scholar 

  12. Aggarwal, A., Kukreja, A., Chopra, P.: Vision based collision avoidance by plotting a virtual obstacle on depth map. In: IEEE International Conference on Information and Automation (ICIA), pp. 532–536 (2010)

    Google Scholar 

  13. Boyu, W., Junyao, G., Li, K., Fan, Y., Xueshan, G., Gao, B.: Indoor mobile robot obstacle detection based on linear structured light vision system. In: IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Biomimetics, pp. 834–839 (2009)

    Google Scholar 

  14. Yue, H., Chen, W., Wu, X., Zhang, J.: Kinect based real time obstacle detection for legged robots in complex environments. In: 8th IEEE Conference onIndustrial Electronics and Applications (ICIEA), pp. 205–210 (2013)

    Google Scholar 

  15. Website of Microsoft Kinect (Components and Specifications). (last visited on April 1, 2015). http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj131033.aspx

  16. Bi, J., Bennett, K.P.: Regression error characteristic curves. In: International Conference on Machine Learning, pp. 43–50 (2003)

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

Authors

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Filippo L. M. Milotta .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2015 Springer International Publishing Switzerland

About this paper

Cite this paper

Milotta, F.L.M., Allegra, D., Stanco, F., Farinella, G.M. (2015). An Electronic Travel Aid to Assist Blind and Visually Impaired People to Avoid Obstacles. In: Azzopardi, G., Petkov, N. (eds) Computer Analysis of Images and Patterns. CAIP 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science(), vol 9257. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23117-4_52

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-23117-4_52

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-23116-7

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-23117-4

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics