Personal Shopping Assistance and Navigator System for Visually Impaired People

In this paper, a personal assistant and navigator system for visually impaired people will be described. The showcase presented intends to demonstrate how partially sighted people could be aided by the technology in performing an ordinary activity, like going to a mall and moving inside it to find a specific product. We propose an Android application that integrates Pedestrian Dead Reckoning and Computer Vision algorithms, using an off-the-shelf Smartphone connected to a Smartwatch. The detection, recognition and pose estimation of specific objects or features in the scene derive an estimate of user location with sub-meter accuracy when combined with a hardware-sensor pedometer. The proposed prototype interfaces with a user by means of Augmented Reality, exploring a variety of sensorial modalities other than just visual overlay, namely audio and haptic modalities, to create a seamless immersive user experience. The interface and interaction of the preliminary platform have been studied through specific evaluation methods. The feedback gathered will be taken into consideration to further improve the proposed system.