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ISSN: 2278 – 1323
International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Engineering & Technology (IJARCET)
Volume 2, Issue 1, January 2013
Review of Real Time Two Phase Navigation Tracking Approach for Assisting Visually Sanjay M.Malode Dr. S.K.Shriwastava Department of Computer Technology, Director, SBITM, K.D.K. College of Engineering Betul, India Nagpur, India. Abstract—
restrictedness is observed for visually impaired people. India
This is perhaps the most humbling of all the disadvantages being the country with world’s largest number of blind, there is
associated with the loss of sight. A wearable device that can a tremendous need of systems that can assist such people in
reduce dependence in all manners of interaction with all local navigation in unfamiliar environment. This paper presents a
environments is of the utmost importance to increase the review on vision aided systems and presents the outline of the
quality of life for the blind or visually impaired individual. proposed low cost design for a navigation system for the visually
impaired people using Android devices.
Assistive technology enables people with disabilities to accomplish daily living tasks and assists them in Keywords- Android, visual impaired person, blind
communication, education, work and recreation activities. navigation, Guide dogs, GPS, image processing.
Principally though, it can help them to achieve greater independence and enhance the quality of life. Of the various assistive technologies available, a special focus was put on those that help blind or visually impaired people with their One of the most important of the complex sensory systems in humans is the vision system. This visual system forms the One of the other techniques still used to assist a blind person basis for almost all navigational tasks performed by human is by the use of “Guide Dogs”. Guide dogs can help a blind body. Without this facility, visually impaired people suffer owner navigate around obstacles and find things like chairs inconveniences in their daily and social life. A total loss of and restrooms, and locations by name. Guide dogs are eyesight is one of the most serious misfortunes that can specially trained to guide their blind masters around obstacles happen to a person. According to a census by World Health and to help them find destinations on command. They are Organization currently there are about 180 million people trained to guide their masters around pot holes, mail boxes, worldwide that are visually disabled, of which 55 million are utility poles, low hanging branches, and many other things blind and this population is estimated to be 75 million by that could cause injury to the blind person. A guide dog is a 2020. India alone homes more than 15 million blind people dog individually trained to assist a person who is blind with navigation. They are trained to recognize and navigate The first essential aspect is to find an application for a around common obstacles such as pot holes, utility poles, pedestrian navigation system with social relevance. The curb cuts, mail boxes, and low-hanging branches, among second issue is to develop an overall outdoor navigation other things. The most well known of these is the Seeing Eye, concept, i.e., covering the whole spectrum of navigation from in Morristown, New Jersey. Only dogs that graduate from the positioning to guidance. Imagine walking into an unfamiliar Seeing Eye are properly called "Seeing Eye Dogs," all other airport, the places that a person has to look for are: the ticket dog guides are called "guide dogs." In some countries the counter, security check-in, boarding gate etc. These places term "guide dog" is also used to refer to assistance animals of are hard to find even when the person can see the signs and all kinds, but in the U.S., the term "guide dog" refers for a visually impaired, it is almost impossible without help specifically to dogs who assist owners who are legally blind. from external sources. Everyday situations like these, present There are several disadvantages of using a guide dog for instance Although the dogs can be trained to navigate various Accessibility to the environment is important for all obstacles, they are partially (red-green) color blind and are individuals. Access includes not only physical mobility, such not capable of interpreting the street signs, also Guide dogs as making a trip to a store by the selected mode of go through extensive training. It takes between 2 and 5 years transportation but also being able to recognize key points or for a guide dog to be ready to be matched with a disabled decision points in the environment. For many blind people person and the person should be compatible with the dog. the loss of sight is paralleled with the loss of independence. ISSN: 2278 – 1323
International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Engineering & Technology (IJARCET)
Volume 2, Issue 1, January 2013
Similarly, the use of SONAR systems though effective, is Loomis [8] proposed a model to assist navigation for visually impaired people and proposed that any such system can be organized in three basic components: Finding one's way through the environment depends on two 1) The position unit and orientation is responsible for distinct 'processes: navigation through large scale space and supplying the navigation system with the user’s spatial the sensing of the immediate environment for impediments to location, in the form of local and global coordinates. Due to travel, such as obstacles and drop-offs. Navigation, in turn, the strong dependence on the environment in which the involves updating one's position and orientation during travel system is used, this is the functional block that more specifically characterizes the navigation systems; Two commonly used techniques for many years to aid a 2) The geographic Information System (GIS) contains main blind person is the use of a long cane and the guide dog. From geo-referenced database system data. This functional block is the early 1950's several efforts in the provision of travel aids an essential component of the navigation systems. Its main for visually impaired people have been made. They range function is to store additional information about user’s from the simple cane to advanced computer based aids. While position, navigation maps, object positions and possible the development of other assisting devices such as Braille electronic reading machine to aid visually impaired people in their everyday life has been very effective [2]. 3) The user interface is the most critical component in the navigation system for assisting the visually impaired because In 1991, Golledge et al; were the earliest to propose the it acts as a substitute for vision sensing (or attempts to). The use of GIS, GPS, speech, and sonic sensor components for user interface must be user-friendly in such a way that the blind navigation in a progress notes on the status of GIS [3]. user does not encounter difficulties which would impede MOBIC, is a GPS based travel aid for blind and elderly. It also daily use. Typically interaction with the visually impaired is uses a speech synthesizer to recite the predetermined travel through audio interfaces, like Text-To-Speech (TTS) or journey plans [4]. This test prototype is implemented on a virtual audio (sonification) and tactile displays like Braille handheld computer with preloaded digital maps and limited wireless capabilities to get latest information from a remote database. A similar system was implemented by Golledge et Another pioneering work by Zelek et. al. involves stereo camera and was designed to provide information about the environment through tactile feedback to the blind [6]. The system comprises of a laptop, a stereo head with two cameras and a virtual touch tactile system. The tactile system is made up of piezoelectric buzzers attached to each finger on a glove worn by the user. Here the cameras capture images, and the disparity is calculated from those images. The depth Figure 2. Functional block diagram of the navigation system proposed by information is conveyed to the user by stimulating the fingers. In this work no image processing efforts are undertaken to highlight the object information in the output. More over the Thus in general most of these systems available suffered In particular for outdoor navigation the availability of GPS-compatible cell phones and PDAs prompted appearance of a number of software products, some of which have  Limitations in capability and usefulness accessibility features making them potentially suitable for the IR requires line-of-sight Active transmission requires blind and visually impaired users. An example of such software that provides verbal instructions is CoPilot Live [7].  Limited user studies to prove effectiveness, and thus A number of electronic mobility aids using sonar have also been developed to detect obstacles, but market acceptance is rather low as useful information obtainable from them are not Recent research efforts are being directed to produce new significantly more than that from the long cane. The outputs navigational system. Such a system should over the above produced are also complex for user understanding. mentioned drawbacks of the available visual aiding systems. The infrared based Talking Signs [6] has been extensively tested and proved to be helpful, in particular for crossing intersections. This system uses directional infrared transmitters mounted in the environment, and a handheld receiver with a speaker. ISSN: 2278 – 1323
International Journal of Advanced Research in Computer Engineering & Technology (IJARCET)
Volume 2, Issue 1, January 2013
In this paper, a survey of different systems to facilitate movement for visually impaired persons is presented. Further an efficient and low cost two phase navigation system for visually impaired people using Android phones is proposed. Since the proposed model is a built in app for android OS there is no need to purchase separate expensive visual aiding instruments, thus making the proposed system a low cost one. Figure 3. SVETA - A Stereo Vision based system http://www.who.int//mipfiles/2400/AllenFoster.pdf [2] F. Wong, R. Nagarajan, S. Yaacob, A. Chekima and N. E. Other terrestrial navigation support using augmented reality Belkhamza. "Electronic travel aidsfor visually impaired - A guided is developed for the sighted people. Metronaut, is a CMU’s campus visitor assistant that uses a bar code reader to infer its position information from a series of bar code labels [3] R.G. Golledge, J. M. Loomis. R.L. Klatzky. A Flury and X. L. placed at strategic locations of the campus [9]. Attempts Yang."Designing a personalguidance system to aid navigation without sight: progress on the GIS component".InternationalJournal are also made to use computer vision techniques for outdoor of Geographical Information Systems. Taylor and Francis Ltd. augmented reality applications. Behringer et al; have developed a system based on the use of horizon silhouettes [4] H. Petrie, V. Johnson, T. Strothotte. A. Raub S. Fritz, and R. for precise orientation of camera to the user’s view [7-11]. Michel. "MOBIC: Designing a Travel Aid for Blind and Elderly This approach is more applicable to natural terrain MitigationLondon, 1996, 49(1): pp. 45-52. Since GPS does not work inside a building, most systems rely [5] R.G. Golledge, R.L. Klatzky, J. M. Loomis. J. Spiegle and J. on relative positioning using sensors such as active badge, Tietz, "A geographicalinformation system for a GPS based personal digital tags, accelerometer, temperature, photodiodes and guidance system'". International Journal ofGeographical beacons [10][11]. The People Sensor, an electronic travel aid Information Science. Taylor and Francis Ltd. London. 1998. 12(7): pp. 727-749. for the visually impaired, uses pyroelectric and ultrasound [6] J. Zelek, S. Bromley. D. Aamar and D. Thompson, "A haptic sensor to locate and differentiate between animate and glove as a tactile vision sensory substitution for way finding". inanimate obstruction in the detection path [12]. Journal of Visual Impairment and Blindness, 2003. pp. 621-632. [7] S. Long, D. Aust. G. D. Abowd and C. Atkeson. "Cyberguide: Prototyping Context-AwareMobile Applications". In CHI "96 Advancements in technology have led to the development Conference in Engineering. Publisher, 1996,pp.293-294. and integration of navigation systems and media into the [8] Loomis, J.M., Golledge, R.G., Klatzky, R.L., Speigle, J.M., mobile hardware. This is useful for receiving and processing Tietz, J., “Personal guidance system for the visually impaired”, different satellite signals like GPS and are used for Proceedings of the First Annual ACM/SIGGAPH Conference on Assistive Technologies, Marina Del Ray, CA, October emergency calls. In many of these applications, real-time 31-November 1, 1994, pp. 85-91. New York: Association for capability implicitly plays an important role. But, only little effort has been put into using real-time capability of mobile [9] Y. Kawai and F. Tomita, "A support system for visually phones. Position-based navigation (called pilotage or piloting) relies on external signals indicating the traveler’s information using acoustic interface"'.IEEE 16th conference on PatternRecognition, 2002, 3: 974 -- 977. Since there has been a tremendous increase in android phones [10] S. Ram and J. Sharf, "The People Sensor: A Mobility Aid for in the market, the proposed navigation system is built for the Visually Impaired", TheSecond International Symposium on Android smartphones and tablets. The system employs the Wearable computer. Pittsburgh. PA, 1998, pp. 166-167. [11] C. Randell and H. Mailer.''Context byanalyzingaccelerometer use of GPS, where the GPS module sends the current location Data". The Fourth International Symposium on Wearable computer. to the device, which is reverse tracked to give the exact name of the location and is then used to guide the visual impaired [12] A. Smailagic and R. Martin. "Metronaut: A Wearable person towards the destination by instructing him/her Computer with Sensing and Global Communication Capabilities". through the correct path. The proposed system is a two phase The First International Symposium on Wearable computer. system as it employs both current real time measurements and also past history. For example a person uses the system to move from A to B for the first time and on the next day he wants to again go from A to B, then in this case the system takes into account the previous history to better assist the person on repeated paths, thereby felicitating fast and quick response time.

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