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Face Recognition Assistant for People with Visual Impairments

Published: 09 September 2019 Publication History

Abstract

Although there are many face recognition systems to help individuals with visual impairments (VIPs) recognize other people, almost all require a database with the pictures and names of the people who should be tracked. These solutions would not be able to help VIPs recognize people they might not know well. In this work, we investigate the requirements and challenges that must be addressed in the design of a face recognition system for helping VIPs recognize people with whom they have weak-ties. We first conducted a formative study with eight visually impaired people. Using insights learned from the formative study, we developed a research prototype that runs on a mobile phone worn around the user's neck. The developed prototype is a wearable face recognition system that opportunistically captures and stores undistorted face images and contextual information about the user's interaction with each person to a database, without the user intervention, as she interacts with new people. We then used this prototype application as a technology probe---asking VIP participants to use the device in a realistic scenario in which they meet and re-encounter several new people. We analyze and report feedback collected from VIPs about the design and use of such a service.

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    cover image Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies
    Proceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies  Volume 3, Issue 3
    September 2019
    1415 pages
    EISSN:2474-9567
    DOI:10.1145/3361560
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    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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    Publication History

    Published: 09 September 2019
    Published in IMWUT Volume 3, Issue 3

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    Author Tags

    1. Visually impaired people
    2. assistive technology
    3. face recognition
    4. weak-ties

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    • (2024)Body-Area Capacitive or Electric Field Sensing for Human Activity Recognition and Human-Computer InteractionProceedings of the ACM on Interactive, Mobile, Wearable and Ubiquitous Technologies10.1145/36435558:1(1-49)Online publication date: 6-Mar-2024
    • (2024)Context matters: Investigating information sharing in mixed-visual ability social interactionsExtended Abstracts of the CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613905.3651121(1-8)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2024)A Contextual Inquiry of People with Vision Impairments in CookingProceedings of the 2024 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3613904.3642233(1-14)Online publication date: 11-May-2024
    • (2023)Empowering Autonomy and Agency: Exploring and Augmenting Accessible Cyber-Physical SystemsAdjunct Proceedings of the 2023 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing & the 2023 ACM International Symposium on Wearable Computing10.1145/3594739.3610770(263-266)Online publication date: 8-Oct-2023
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    • (2022)Shared Privacy Concerns of the Visually Impaired and Sighted Bystanders with Camera-Based Assistive TechnologiesACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/350685715:2(1-33)Online publication date: 19-May-2022
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