New electronic cane for visually impaired people for obstacle detection and recognition

In this paper, we describe a new electronic white cane for visually impaired people. Our device may enable blind individuals to see the world with their ears. In fact, we used different types of sensors to detect and recognize obstacles. Our choice of sensors is based not only on system requirement but also on technology cost. Accordingly, we used two ultrasonic sensors and one monocular camera. With such low-cost measurement units, we rely on fusing data obtained by our complementary sensors in further steps. An alert speech message is then sent to the user making him know about the presence and nature of potential encountered obstacle by means of a Bluetooth module.