Enhancing Assisted Living Technology with Extended Visual Memory

Human vision and memory are powerful cognitive faculties by which we understand the world. However, they are imperfect and further, subject to deterioration with age. We propose a cognitive-inspired computational model, Extended Visual Memory (EVM), within the Computer-Aided Vision (CAV) framework, to assist human in vision-related tasks. We exploit wearable sensors such as cameras, GPS and ambient computing facilities to complement a user's vision and memory functions by answering four types of queries central to visual activities, namely, Retrieval, Understanding, Navigation and Search. Learning of EVM relies on both frequency-based and attention-driven mechanisms to store view-based visual fragments (VF), which are abstracted into high-level visual schemas (VS), both in the visual long-term memory. During inference, the visual short-term memory plays a key role in visual similarity computation between input (or its schematic representation) and VF, exemplified from VS when necessary. We present an assisted living scenario, termed EViMAL (Extended Visual Memory for Assisted Living), targeted at mild dementia patients to provide novel functions such as hazard-warning, visual reminder, object look-up and event review. We envisage EVM having the potential benefits in alleviating memory loss, improving recall precision and enhancing memory capacity through external support.