Assistive technology for the visually impaired and blind people is a research field that is gaining increasing prominence owing to an explosion of new interest in it from disparate disciplines. The field has a very relevant social impact on our ever-increasing aging and blind populations. While many excellent state-of-the-art accounts have been written till date, all of them are subjective in nature. We performed an objective statistical survey across the various sub-disciplines in the field and applied information analysis and network-theory techniques to answer several key questions relevant to the field. To analyze the field we compiled an extensive database of scientific research publications over the last two decades. We inferred interesting patterns and statistics concerning the main research areas and underlying themes, identified leading journals and conferences, captured growth patterns of the research field; identified active research communities and present our interpretation of trends in the field for the near future. Our results reveal that there has been a sustained growth in this field; from less than 50 publications per year in the mid 1990s to close to 400 scientific publications per year in 2014. Assistive Technology for persons with visually impairments is expected to grow at a swift pace and impact the lives of individuals and the elderly in ways not previously possible.

An insight into assistive technology for the visually impaired and blind people: state-of-the-art and future trends

The development of walking assistants for visually impaired people has become a prominent research area due to the rapid growth of these individuals in recent decades. Although numerous frameworks have been developed to aid visually impaired people, a considerable portion of these is limited in their scopes. In this review, we exhibit a similar review of walking assistants for visually impaired people to demonstrate the advancement of such technologies. This review discusses the recent innovative technologies developed for the visually impaired to aid them in walking with their merits and demerits. With the help of this review, a schema is drawn for upcoming development in the field of sensors, computer vision, and smartphone-based walking assistants. This review aims to present the majority of the issues of such frameworks to serve as a basis for different researchers to develop walking assistants that ensure movability and safety of visually impaired people.

Developing Walking Assistants for Visually Impaired People: A Review

Blind or visually impaired people face special difficulties in daily life. With the advances in vision sensors and computer vision, the design of wearable vision assistance system is promising. In order to improve the life quality of the visually impaired group, a wearable system is proposed in this paper. Typically the performance of visual sensors is affected by a variety of complex factors in practice, resulting in a large number of noise and distortion. In this paper, we will creatively leverage image quality evaluation to select the captured images through vision sensors, which can ensure the input quality of scenes for the final identification system. First, we use binocular vision sensors to capture images in a fixed frequency and choose the informative ones based on stereo image quality assessment. Then the captured images will be sent to cloud for further computing. Specially, the detection and automatic result will be done for all the received images. Convolutional neural network based on big data will be used in this step. According to image analysis, the cloud computing can return the requested information for users, which can help them make a more reasonable decision in further action. Simulations and experiments show that the proposed method can solve the problem effectively. In addition, statistical results also demonstrate that wearable vision system can make visually impaired group more satisfied in visual needed situations.

Wearable Vision Assistance System Based on Binocular Sensors for Visually Impaired Users

Branch detection for apple trees trained in fruiting wall architecture using depth features and Regions-Convolutional Neural Network (R-CNN)

This paper presents a computer vision based sensory substitution device for the visually impaired. Its main objective is to provide the users with a 3D representation of the environment around them, conveyed by means of the hearing and tactile senses. One of the biggest challenges for this system is to ensure pervasiveness, i.e., to be usable in any indoor or outdoor environments and in any illumination conditions. This work reveals both the hardware (3D acquisition system) and software (3D processing pipeline) used for developing this sensory substitution device and provides insight on its exploitation in various scenarios. Preliminary experiments with blind users revealed good usability results and provided valuable feedback for system improvement.

/pdf/computer-vision-for-the-visually-impaired-the-sound-of-3u8gxsqyar.pdf

Computer Vision for the Visually Impaired: the Sound of Vision System

Kin2. A Kinect 2 toolbox for MATLAB

Computing advances and increased smartphone use gives technology system designers greater flexibility in exploiting computer vision to support visually impaired users. Understanding these users' needs will certainly provide insight for the development of improved usability of computing devices.

http://www.cvc.uab.es/~bogdan/Publications/raducanu_Computer2013.pdf

New Opportunities for Computer Vision-Based Assistive Technology Systems for the Visually Impaired

A multiple camera calibration and point cloud fusion tool for Kinect V2

http://www.cvc.uab.es/~bogdan/Publications/raducanu_Neucom2015.pdf

Head-gestures mirroring detection in dyadic social interactions with computer vision-based wearable devices

Visual impairment affects the normal course of activities in everyday life including mobility, education, employment, and social interaction. Most of the existing technical solutions devoted to empowering the visually impaired people are in the areas of navigation (obstacle avoidance), access to printed information and object recognition. Less effort has been dedicated so far in developing solutions to support social interactions. In this paper, we introduce a Social-Aware Assistant (SAA) that provides visually impaired people with cues to enhance their face-to-face conversations. The system consists of a perceptive component (represented by smartglasses with an embedded video camera) and a feedback component (represented by a haptic belt). When the vision system detects a head nodding, the belt vibrates, thus suggesting the user to replicate (mirror) the gesture. In our experiments, sighted persons interacted with blind people wearing the SAA. We instructed the former to mirror the noddings according to the vibratory signal, while the latter interacted naturally. After the face-to-face conversation, the participants had an interview to express their experience regarding the use of this new technological assistant. With the data collected during the experiment, we have assessed quantitatively and qualitatively the device usefulness and user satisfaction.

Juan R. Terven

Papers

Kin2. A Kinect 2 toolbox for MATLAB

New Opportunities for Computer Vision-Based Assistive Technology Systems for the Visually Impaired

A multiple camera calibration and point cloud fusion tool for Kinect V2

Head-gestures mirroring detection in dyadic social interactions with computer vision-based wearable devices

A Social-Aware Assistant to support individuals with visual impairments during social interaction: A systematic requirements analysis