Citation

Ghilardi MC, Macedo RCO, Manssour IH. Procedia Comput. Sci. 2016; 80: 662-672.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016, Elsevier Publishing)

DOI

10.1016/j.procs.2016.05.356

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

In recent years increased the research interest in the development of different approaches to support the mobility of the visually impaired. The automatic detection of tactile paving surface is one important topic of research, not only to help the mobility of visually impaired persons, but also for use in the displacement of autonomous robots, providing a safely route and warnings. In this paper we propose an approach for tactile paving surface detection in real-time with the purpose to assist visually impaired persons. It uses computer vision algorithms combined with decision tree to eliminate some possible false alarms. We assume the visually impaired persons holds a smartphone, which is used to obtain images, as well as to assist him by audio feedback to keep it on the tactile paving surface. This problem is very challenging, mainly due to illumination changes, occlusion, image noise and resolution, as well as different possible colors of the tactile paving surfaces. Experimental results indicate that the proposed approach works well in low resolution images, effectively detecting the tactile paving surfaces in real test scenarios.

Language: en