Indoor-Guided Navigation for People Who Are Blind: Crowdsourcing for Route Mapping and Assistance

This paper presents an approach to enhance electronic traveling aids (ETAs) for people who are blind and severely visually impaired (BSVI) using indoor orientation and guided navigation by employing social outsourcing of indoor route mapping and assistance processes. This type of approach is necessa...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Applied sciences Vol. 12; no. 1; p. 523
Main Authors: Plikynas, Darius, Indriulionis, Audrius, Laukaitis, Algirdas, Sakalauskas, Leonidas
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Basel MDPI AG 01.01.2022
Subjects:
Algorithms
blind and severely visually impaired
Blindness
Cellular telephones
computer vision
Crowdsourcing
Data processing
electronic travelling aids
guided navigation
Interfaces
Operating systems
Semantics
Sensors
Servers
Smartphones
social networking
Social networks
Software
Visual impairment
Web 2.0
ISSN:2076-3417, 2076-3417
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This paper presents an approach to enhance electronic traveling aids (ETAs) for people who are blind and severely visually impaired (BSVI) using indoor orientation and guided navigation by employing social outsourcing of indoor route mapping and assistance processes. This type of approach is necessary because GPS does not work well, and infrastructural investments are absent or too costly to install for indoor navigation. Our approach proposes the prior outsourcing of vision-based recordings of indoor routes from an online network of seeing volunteers, who gather and constantly update a web cloud database of indoor routes using specialized sensory equipment and web services. Computational intelligence-based algorithms process sensory data and prepare them for BSVI usage. In this way, people who are BSVI can obtain ready-to-use access to the indoor routes database. This type of service has not previously been offered in such a setting. Specialized wearable sensory ETA equipment, depth cameras, smartphones, computer vision algorithms, tactile and audio interfaces, and computational intelligence algorithms are employed for that matter. The integration of semantic data of points of interest (such as stairs, doors, WC, entrances/exits) and evacuation schemes could make the proposed approach even more attractive to BVSI users. Presented approach crowdsources volunteers’ real-time online help for complex navigational situations using a mobile app, a live video stream from BSVI wearable cameras, and digitalized maps of buildings’ evacuation schemes.
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ISSN:2076-3417
2076-3417
DOI:10.3390/app12010523