Towards a Sign-Based Indoor Navigation System for People with Visual Impairments

Rituerto, Alejandro; Fusco, Giovanni; Coughlan, James M.

doi:10.1145/2982142.2982202

Cited by 20 publications

(8 citation statements)

References 8 publications

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“…To overcome this limitation in past work we developed an indoor localization system [7] that combines step counting with computer vision-based sign recognition. However, while the step counting algorithm works well for participants who walk with a regular gait, it is unreliable when the gait becomes irregular and halting -which is not unusual when visually impaired people explore unfamiliar surroundings.…”

Section: State Of the Art And Related Technologymentioning

confidence: 99%

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Indoor Localization Using Computer Vision and Visual-Inertial Odometry

Fusco

Coughlan

2018

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. Indoor wayfinding is a major challenge for people with visual impairments, who are often unable to see visual cues such as informational signs, landmarks and structural features that people with normal vision rely on for wayfinding. We describe a novel indoor localization approach to facilitate wayfinding that uses a smartphone to combine computer vision and a dead reckoning technique known as visual-inertial odometry (VIO). The approach uses sign recognition to estimate the user's location on the map whenever a known sign is recognized, and VIO to track the user's movements when no sign is visible. The advantages of our approach are (a) that it runs on a standard smartphone and requires no new physical infrastructure, just a digital 2D map of the indoor environment that includes the locations of signs in it; and (b) it allows the user to walk freely without having to actively search for signs with the smartphone (which is challenging for people with severe visual impairments). We report a formative study with four blind users demonstrating the feasibility of the approach and suggesting areas for future improvement. State of the Art and Related TechnologyThe key to any wayfinding aid is localization -a means of estimating and tracking a person's location as they travel in an environment. The most widespread localization approach is GPS, which enables a variety of wayfinding tools such as Google Maps, Seeing Eye GPS 1 and BlindSquare, but it is only accurate outdoors. There are a range of indoor localization approaches, including Bluetooth beacons [1], Wi-Fi triangulation 2 , infrared light beacons [2] and RFIDs [3]. However, all of these approaches incur the cost of installing and maintaining physical infrastructure, or of updating the system as the existing infrastructure changes (e.g., whenever Wi-Fi access points change). Dead reckoning approaches such as step counting using inertial navigation [4] can estimate relative movements without any physical infrastructure, but this tracking estimate drifts over time unless it is augmented by absolute location estimates.

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Section: State Of the Art And Related Technologymentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Our current prototype recognizes only barcode-like signs [9] printed on paper (Fig. 1b), but in the future we will extend the approach to recognize arbitrary flat signs, such as the standard Exit signs that our previous system [7] recognized.…”

Section: Overall Approachmentioning

confidence: 99%

Indoor Localization Using Computer Vision and Visual-Inertial Odometry

Fusco

Coughlan

2018

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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“…Smartphone apps that assist visually impaired individuals to navigate indoor and outdoor environments [Rituerto et al 2016; Ahmetovic et al 2016a; Ahmetovic et al 2016b] have been proposed. For example, iMove 3 is a commercial application that informs the user about the current address and nearby points of interest.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mind Your Crossings

Ahmetovic

Manduchi

Coughlan

et al. 2017

ACM Trans. Access. Comput.

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For blind travelers, finding crosswalks and remaining within their borders while traversing them is a crucial part of any trip involving street crossings. While standard Orientation & Mobility (O&M) techniques allow blind travelers to safely negotiate street crossings, additional information about crosswalks and other important features at intersections would be helpful in many situations, resulting in greater safety and/or comfort during independent travel. For instance, in planning a trip a blind pedestrian may wish to be informed of the presence of all marked crossings near a desired route. We have conducted a survey of several O&M experts from the United States and Italy to determine the role that crosswalks play in travel by blind pedestrians. The results show stark differences between survey respondents from the U.S. compared with Italy: the former group emphasized the importance of following standard O&M techniques at all legal crossings (marked or unmarked), while the latter group strongly recommended crossing at marked crossings whenever possible. These contrasting opinions reflect differences in the traffic regulations of the two countries and highlight the diversity of needs that travelers in different regions may have. To address the challenges faced by blind pedestrians in negotiating street crossings, we devised a computer vision-based technique that mines existing spatial image databases for discovery of zebra crosswalks in urban settings. Our algorithm first searches for zebra crosswalks in satellite images; all candidates thus found are validated against spatially registered Google Street View images. This cascaded approach enables fast and reliable discovery and localization of zebra crosswalks in large image datasets. While fully automatic, our algorithm can be improved by a final crowdsourcing validation. To this end, we developed a Pedestrian Crossing Human Validation (PCHV) web service, which supports crowdsourcing to rule out false positives and identify false negatives.

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“…A unique and further set of hurdles are encountered by individuals with disabilities if the building or structure does not comply with standards denoted in the Americans with Disabilities Act. Currently, the majority of studies examining navigation solutions for disabled users focus on ways to better match designs to the needs of the blind community (e.g., [1][2][3]). While these navigational solutions are valuable, less consideration has been given to the needs of other groups who may also benefit from support with the process of orientation and navigation, as well as the intersections of the needs of these groups.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Towards identifying and classifying navigation strategies among individuals with diverse disabilities

Gupta¹,

Kuber²,

Branham³

2019

iConference 2019 Proceedings

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In this paper, we describe a study examining navigation practices of individuals with disabilities-including people with visual, mobility, and cognitive disabilities, as well as older adults-towards identifying and classifying the common features they utilize in unfamiliar environments. Analysis of initial data reveals previously-undocumented commonalities and departures amongst users from different populations. For example, we found that natural light sources are an important navigation cues for not only blind and low vision individuals, but also for older adults and mobility-impaired individuals. This suggests novel design features for assistive apps to better support navigating indoors in absence of windows. Our work aims to inform design of more universally-usable navigation solutions that address collective needs of a wide range of users.

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Towards a Sign-Based Indoor Navigation System for People with Visual Impairments

Cited by 20 publications

References 8 publications

Indoor Localization Using Computer Vision and Visual-Inertial Odometry

Indoor Localization Using Computer Vision and Visual-Inertial Odometry

Mind Your Crossings

Towards identifying and classifying navigation strategies among individuals with diverse disabilities

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