Cherry Kim
Jun Han
ABSTRACT
Visually impaired individuals often struggle to pinpoint their location in indoor settings, hindering their ability to navigate independently. Current solutions, such as WiFi-based localization and smart canes fall short due to interference, high deployment costs, and/or imprecise localization. To address this problem, we propose ImpacTile, a novel tile-level localization system designed specifically for the visually impaired. ImpacTile determines the user's position by analyzing the distinct sound produced when their cane strikes the floor tile leveraging the underlying structural uniqueness. As a proof-of-concept, we present a preliminary evaluation with real-world experiments in three buildings on our campus, encompassing a total of over a thousand tiles to demonstrate an average tile-level localization accuracy of 94.8%.
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Index Terms
- ImpacTile: Tile-level Localization for the Visually Impaired using Structural Uniqueness
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