Smart Phone-based Indoor Guidance System for the Visually Impaired

A smart phone camera based indoor guidance system to aid the visually impaired is presented. Most proposed systems for aiding the visually impaired with indoor navigation are not feasible for widespread use due to cost, usability, or portability. A smart phone vision- based indoor guidance system that is simple, accessible, inexpensive, and discrete is developed to aid the visually impaired to navigate unfamiliar environments such as public buildings. The system consists of a smart phone and a server. The smart phone captures and transmits pictures of the user's surroundings to the server. The server processes the images and matches them to a database of stored images of the building. After matching features, the location and orientation of the person is calculated using 3D location correspondence data stored for features of each image. Positional information is then transmitted back to the smart phone and communicated to the user via text-to-speech. This paper focuses on developing the vision technology for this unique application rather than building the complete system. Experimental results demonstrate the ability of the system to quickly and accurately determine the pose of the user in a university building.