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Crosswatch: A Camera Phone System for Orienting Visually Impaired Pedestrians at Traffic Intersections

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Computers Helping People with Special Needs (ICCHP 2008)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNISA,volume 5105))

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Abstract

Urban intersections are the most dangerous parts of a blind or visually impaired person’s travel. To address this problem, this paper describes the novel “Crosswatch” system, which uses computer vision to provide information about the location and orientation of crosswalks to a blind or visually impaired pedestrian holding a camera cell phone. A prototype of the system runs on an off-the-shelf Nokia camera phone in real time, which automatically takes a few images per second, uses the cell phone’s built-in computer to analyze each image in a fraction of a second and sounds an audio tone when it detects a crosswalk. Tests with blind subjects demonstrate the feasibility of the system and its ability to provide useful crosswalk alignment information under real-world conditions.

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Klaus Miesenberger Joachim Klaus Wolfgang Zagler Arthur Karshmer

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© 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Ivanchenko, V., Coughlan, J., Shen, H. (2008). Crosswatch: A Camera Phone System for Orienting Visually Impaired Pedestrians at Traffic Intersections. In: Miesenberger, K., Klaus, J., Zagler, W., Karshmer, A. (eds) Computers Helping People with Special Needs. ICCHP 2008. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 5105. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70540-6_168

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-70540-6_168

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-540-70539-0

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-540-70540-6

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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