Fuzzy gaze control-based navigational assistance system for visually impaired people in a dynamic indoor environment

285 million people are estimated to be visually impaired worldwide. Visually impaired people typically use a white cane or a guide dog or both of them to walk down the street. However, such as a cane and/or a dog are not enough to secure them from being collided with obstacles in a dynamic environment. This paper proposes a navigational assistance system based on fuzzy integral-based gaze control for visually impaired people in a dynamic indoor environment. It largely consists of an RGB-D camera and a vibrotactile vest interface. The RGB-D camera detects static and dynamic obstacles and obtains obstacle information on their center positions, sizes, and velocities. The fuzzy integral-based gaze control for obstacle detection is proposed to reduce a blind spot of the camera and obtain more information of the environment. The vibrotactile vest interface notifies a direction to avoid the obstacle using a fuzzy integral-based imminent-obstacle selection algorithm. To confirm the performance of the proposed assistance system for visually impaired people, experiments are carried out in an indoor dynamic environment.