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Stereo Vision Based Sensory Substitution for the Visually Impaired

The development of computer vision based systems dedicated to help visually impaired people to perceive the environment, to orientate and navigate has been the main research subject of many works in the recent years. A significant ensemble of resources has been employed to support the development of...

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Autores principales: Caraiman, Simona, Zvoristeanu, Otilia, Burlacu, Adrian, Herghelegiu, Paul
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: MDPI 2019
Materias:
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6630569/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31226796
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s19122771
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author Caraiman, Simona
Zvoristeanu, Otilia
Burlacu, Adrian
Herghelegiu, Paul
author_facet Caraiman, Simona
Zvoristeanu, Otilia
Burlacu, Adrian
Herghelegiu, Paul
author_sort Caraiman, Simona
collection PubMed
description The development of computer vision based systems dedicated to help visually impaired people to perceive the environment, to orientate and navigate has been the main research subject of many works in the recent years. A significant ensemble of resources has been employed to support the development of sensory substitution devices (SSDs) and electronic travel aids for the rehabilitation of the visually impaired. The Sound of Vision (SoV) project used a comprehensive approach to develop such an SSD, tackling all the challenging aspects that so far restrained the large scale adoption of such systems by the intended audience: Wearability, real-time operation, pervasiveness, usability, cost. This article is set to present the artificial vision based component of the SoV SSD that performs the scene reconstruction and segmentation in outdoor environments. In contrast with the indoor use case, where the system acquires depth input from a structured light camera, in outdoors SoV relies on stereo vision to detect the elements of interest and provide an audio and/or haptic representation of the environment to the user. Our stereo-based method is designed to work with wearable acquisition devices and still provide a real-time, reliable description of the scene in the context of unreliable depth input from the stereo correspondence and of the complex 6 DOF motion of the head-worn camera. We quantitatively evaluate our approach on a custom benchmarking dataset acquired with SoV cameras and provide the highlights of the usability evaluation with visually impaired users.
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spelling pubmed-66305692019-08-19 Stereo Vision Based Sensory Substitution for the Visually Impaired Caraiman, Simona Zvoristeanu, Otilia Burlacu, Adrian Herghelegiu, Paul Sensors (Basel) Article The development of computer vision based systems dedicated to help visually impaired people to perceive the environment, to orientate and navigate has been the main research subject of many works in the recent years. A significant ensemble of resources has been employed to support the development of sensory substitution devices (SSDs) and electronic travel aids for the rehabilitation of the visually impaired. The Sound of Vision (SoV) project used a comprehensive approach to develop such an SSD, tackling all the challenging aspects that so far restrained the large scale adoption of such systems by the intended audience: Wearability, real-time operation, pervasiveness, usability, cost. This article is set to present the artificial vision based component of the SoV SSD that performs the scene reconstruction and segmentation in outdoor environments. In contrast with the indoor use case, where the system acquires depth input from a structured light camera, in outdoors SoV relies on stereo vision to detect the elements of interest and provide an audio and/or haptic representation of the environment to the user. Our stereo-based method is designed to work with wearable acquisition devices and still provide a real-time, reliable description of the scene in the context of unreliable depth input from the stereo correspondence and of the complex 6 DOF motion of the head-worn camera. We quantitatively evaluate our approach on a custom benchmarking dataset acquired with SoV cameras and provide the highlights of the usability evaluation with visually impaired users. MDPI 2019-06-20 /pmc/articles/PMC6630569/ /pubmed/31226796 http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s19122771 Text en © 2019 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).
spellingShingle Article
Caraiman, Simona
Zvoristeanu, Otilia
Burlacu, Adrian
Herghelegiu, Paul
Stereo Vision Based Sensory Substitution for the Visually Impaired
title Stereo Vision Based Sensory Substitution for the Visually Impaired
title_full Stereo Vision Based Sensory Substitution for the Visually Impaired
title_fullStr Stereo Vision Based Sensory Substitution for the Visually Impaired
title_full_unstemmed Stereo Vision Based Sensory Substitution for the Visually Impaired
title_short Stereo Vision Based Sensory Substitution for the Visually Impaired
title_sort stereo vision based sensory substitution for the visually impaired
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6630569/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/31226796
http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/s19122771
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