Indoor Navigational Aid System for the Visually Impaired

A navigation aid system provides additional help to a visually impaired person in navigation. It helps to move in a given environment with certain level of confidence in the absence of own visual ability. Using cane, or pet dog are conventional ways of navigational aid. Researchers have recently developed navigational aid systems based on various computer technologies. For example radio-frequency identification tags, Global Positioning System, Geographical Information System, and vision-to-sound systems using sensory substitution. These innovative approaches provide beneficial systems but are tied to some limitation. Dependence upon installed hardware devices, remote information server, GPS signal are some of the limitations faced by the existing contemporary research in navigational aid systems. We propose to develop a computer vision based system that would use camera vision input and text-to-speech synthesized output to provide navigation aid. It will be independent from any remote factors and will have the inherent characteristic of improvement with further advancements in computer vision.