Indoor navigation for the visually impaired by reading door label

Kuan, Wei Yeow (2024) Indoor navigation for the visually impaired by reading door label. Final Year Project, UTAR.

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Abstract

Recently, there have been many efforts from people implementing technology that can provide help for people with special needs. Similarly, the attention and study on the indoor navigation for the visually impaired was getting more attention from the world. The aim of these is to further enhance the quality of daily life of the visually impaired by enabling them to travel alone. The major challenge of this research is how to provide correct navigation to the visually impaired by utilizing the information about their surroundings in an indoor environment. As a general knowledge, signs, and label was widely used in the indoor environment to navigate peoples the direction of the locations. Unfortunately, the visually impaired was unable to see those signs and label due to their disability. Therefore, in this project, an indoor navigation system was implemented by reading door labels. The system only used a laptop, camera, and earphones to perform the navigation. The captured images of the user’s surroundings will be sent to the laptop for further processing. A pre-recorded map of the indoor environment will be installed in the system to perform shortest path calculation or current location notification when the door label is detected. Lastly, the navigation instructions will be converted into speech to convey to the user. The system was controlled in a low-cost implementation since not all of the visually impaired are able to afford high specification of navigation hardware. Therefore, the limitations of this project might be related to the quality of the image acquired and the processing power of the laptop. Both issues were related to the performance of the system, and these might affect the accuracy of navigation.

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