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Indoor Sign Recognition for the Blind

Published: 26 September 2016 Publication History

Abstract

Blind people face difficulties when navigating unfamiliar environments. The information displayed on indoor signs and notice boards is of no use to them. In order to assist them with this challenge, we propose a real time system that can recognise a selection of indoor navigational signs placed over clear backgrounds. The selection of signs will consist of common samples from several different types of indoor signs. Given a captured image, the approach is to use image processing techniques to find the region of interest(ROI) that contains the sign and then extract this region for classification. Using sliding windows for searching the ROI can be time consuming and can lead to many false classifications, hence we used a more explicit approach that is faster and more reliable. We first segment the signs by colour, and then by shape recognition. The sign-type classification is done using a tree search structure that enables the use of iterative contour descriptors like the speeded-up-robust-features(SURF). Once a sign has been detected, this information is communicated to the user via stereo headsets. To evaluate the system's performance, several random pictures with and without signs were used to determine the system's detection rate. The user-feedback performance was evaluated by testing the system's usability score with volunteers.

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Cited By

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  • (2023)Improved Detection and Interpretation of Multilingual Signboards in Natural Scene for Visually Impaired People2023 IEEE International Conference on Data and Software Engineering (ICoDSE)10.1109/ICoDSE59534.2023.10291385(126-131)Online publication date: 7-Sep-2023
  • (2022)Traveling More Independently: A Study on the Diverse Needs and Challenges of People with Visual or Mobility Impairments in Unfamiliar Indoor EnvironmentsACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/351425515:2(1-44)Online publication date: 19-May-2022
  • (2020)Sistema de Reconocimiento de Señalamientos en Entornos Abiertos para la Orientación de Personas con Discapacidad VisualMemoria Investigaciones en Ingeniería10.36561/NG.19.4(43-62)Online publication date: 16-Dec-2020
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cover image ACM Other conferences
SAICSIT '16: Proceedings of the Annual Conference of the South African Institute of Computer Scientists and Information Technologists
September 2016
422 pages
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 26 September 2016

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Author Tags

  1. colour-segmentation
  2. computer-vision
  3. shape-detection
  4. sign-recognition
  5. visual aid system

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SAICSIT '16

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Overall Acceptance Rate 187 of 439 submissions, 43%

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View all
  • (2023)Improved Detection and Interpretation of Multilingual Signboards in Natural Scene for Visually Impaired People2023 IEEE International Conference on Data and Software Engineering (ICoDSE)10.1109/ICoDSE59534.2023.10291385(126-131)Online publication date: 7-Sep-2023
  • (2022)Traveling More Independently: A Study on the Diverse Needs and Challenges of People with Visual or Mobility Impairments in Unfamiliar Indoor EnvironmentsACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/351425515:2(1-44)Online publication date: 19-May-2022
  • (2020)Sistema de Reconocimiento de Señalamientos en Entornos Abiertos para la Orientación de Personas con Discapacidad VisualMemoria Investigaciones en Ingeniería10.36561/NG.19.4(43-62)Online publication date: 16-Dec-2020
  • (2020)Travelling more independently: A Requirements Analysis for Accessible Journeys to Unknown Buildings for People with Visual ImpairmentsProceedings of the 22nd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3373625.3417022(1-11)Online publication date: 26-Oct-2020

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