Situation-based indoor wayfinding system for the visually impaired

[Wotipati]

Links

• Paper: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/2049536.2049545

Abstract

This paper presents an indoor wayfinding system to help the visually impaired finding their way to a given destination in an unfamiliar environment. The main novelty is the use of the user's situation as the basis for designing color codes to explain the environmental information and for developing the wayfinding system to detect and recognize such color codes. Actually, people would require different information according to their situations. Therefore, situation-based color codes are designed, including location-specific codes and guide codes. These color codes are affixed in certain locations to provide information to the visually impaired, and their location and meaning are then recognized using the proposed wayfinding system. Consisting of three steps, the proposed wayfinding system first recognizes the current situation using a vocabulary tree that is built on the shape properties of images taken of various situations. Next, it detects and recognizes the necessary codes according to the current situation, based on color and edge information. Finally, it provides the user with environmental information and their path through an auditory interface. To assess the validity of the proposed wayfinding system, we have conducted field test with four visually impaired, then the results showed that they can find the optimal path in real-time with an accuracy of 95%.

• 屋内のピクトグラムやカラーコードを認識して，目的地への経路を案内するシステムを提案
• 画像認識システムを使って周囲の状況（通路やドアの前，ホールにいるかなど）も検出
• 案内はTTSで行う

[yutaroyamanaka]

• Location-Specific code, Guide codeのピクトグラムは 研究者がデザインをし、検出が距離や左右からの角度、照明条件にロバストであることを検証した。

• 評価指標は, 目的地までのAverage Travel time, Decision Error rate, 目的地まで視覚障害者が提案システムを使って移動したルートと晴眼者が通常通り歩いたOptimal Routeとのズレを比較した。

• 特に他のシステムとの比較はおこなっていないが、Decision Error はほとんどなく、Optimal Routeに近い移動をおこなった。