G. Balakrishnan This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.1, G. Sainarayanan1 , R. Nagarajan2 and Sazali Yaacob2
1AI Research Group, School of Engineering and Information Technology, Universiti Malaysia Sabah, Locked Bag No. 2073, 88999, Kota Kinabalu, Malaysia 2School of Mechatronics, Northern Malaysia University College of Engineering, 01000 Kangar, Perlis, Malaysia
Received: September 12, 2005 Accepted: June 22, 2006 Publication Date: March 1, 2007
Visually impaired find their navigation difficult as they often lack the needed information for bypassing obstacles and hazards. Electronic Travel Aids (ETAs) are devices that use sensor technology to assist and improve the blind user’s mobility in terms of safety and speed. Modern ETAs does not provide distance information directly and clearly. This paper proposes a method for determining distance using a stereo matching method to help blind individuals for their navigation. The system developed in this work, named Stereo Vision based Electronic Travel Aid (SVETA), consists of a computing device, stereo cameras and stereo earphones, all molded in a helmet. An improved area based stereo matching is performed over the transformed images to calculate dense disparity image. Low texture filter and left/right consistency check are carried out to remove the noises and to highlight the obstacles. A sonification procedure is proposed to map the disparity image to stereo musical sound, which has information about the features of the scene infront of the user. The sound is conveyed to the blind user through stereo headphones. Experimentations have been conducted and preliminary investigations have proven the viability of this method for applying in real time environment.
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