Wearable RGB Camera-based Navigation System for the Visually Impaired

This paper proposes a wearable RGB camera-based system for sightless people through which they can easily and independently navigate their surrounding environment. The system uses a single head or chest mounted RGB camera to capture the visual information from the current user's path, and an auditory system to inform the user about the right direction to follow. This information is obtained through a novel alignment technique which takes as input a visual snippet from the current user's path and responds with the corresponding location on the training path. Then, assuming that the wearable camera pose reflects the user's pose, the system corrects the current user's pose to align with the corresponding pose in the training location. As a result, the user receives periodically an acoustic instruction to assist him in reaching his destination safely. The experiments conducted to test the system, in various collected indoor and outdoor paths, have shown that it satisfies its design specifications in terms of correctly generating the instructions for guiding the visually impaired along these paths, in addition to its ability to detect and correct deviations from the predefined paths.