A Development of Environment Verification System “View-Aid” Using Digital Wireless Camera for Low Vision

We have been developing a portable system to verify the life environment without other people\´s supports for low-vision. We call this system "View-aid". View-aid system is glasses with a small digital wireless CMOS camera. And View-aid is used when low-vision wants to verify the surroundings. The image that is taken with this camera is transmitted to the PDA with the Bluetooth transmission. It takes about 0.9 second to transmit a QVGA size image, and about 2 seconds in the VGA size. We have developed the function of recognizing signature characters in life environment with View-aid system. This function is to detect signature characters in the taken image and to read out the price on goods. From our experimental result the success rate of detecting signature characters was 88%, but the rate of reading out signature characters was 25%. Our problem in the future is to raise this success rate. We proposed a method of obstacle detecting on the road using forecast algorithm.