Lightweight smart glass system with audio aid for visually impaired people

In this paper, we present a new smart glass system for people who are blind or have low vision. Individuals with visual disability are difficult to communicate effectively with their environment. The blind or visually impaired rely largely on their other senses such as hearing, touch, and smell in order to understand their surroundings. It is pretty hard for them to go out alone, not to mention finding toilets, subway stations, restaurants and so on. Giving blind people the great accessibility to their environment is the objective of the smart glass system. This smart glass system can see the world for them and give voice instructions and hints through wireless bone conduction headphones. This smart glass system will help visually impaired people gain increased independence and freedom in city life. And we have implemented an application of public signs recognition on the smart glass system. This application can detect and recognize the public signs in cities, and give corresponding voice hints to the blindness. The proposed prototype system is based on Intel Edison, and the application in the system is written in C++ with libraries of OpenCV. Extended demonstration of the system will be presented to show how the system helps the blindness “see the world”.