VIAssist: Assistance for the Visually Impaired

Abstract

There has been a vast advancement in Computer Vision since its inception and it has been used for the ease and betterment of the visually impaired. In this paper, we propose a bus number recognition system which will assist the visually impaired to board the correct bus. The proposed work will be deployed on bus stops. It will consist of a camera, a processing unit and speakers. Once a bus is detected, the visually impaired will be notified that a bus is approaching through constant beeps. The video feed will be further processed and ultimately the bus number and the destination of the bus will be announced through the speakers. The buses in Maharashtra have bus numbers displayed in Devanagari script. Hence we store templates corresponding to the Devanagari bus numbers in the database. Various cities use different scripts, thus by changing the database of templates this system can adapt accordingly.