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Articles

Virtual eye for smartphones for the blind

iVirtualEye, an application for smartphones that on crosswalks will signal the location of stripes to the blind, inform if the light is green or red, and whether any vehicles approaching, is being developed by a team from the Polish company Transition Technologies S.A. in cooperation with the Polish Association of the Blind. The project is co-financed by the Innovative Economy Programme and will be implemented until 2013.

Dr Eng. Konrad Wojdan of Transition Technologies, a researcher in the iVirtualEye project, explained in an interview with PAP that iVirtualEye will help the blind or visually impaired able to cross streets and avoid the dangers associated with moving around the city. Using GPS and camera connected to a smartphone, the application will perform real time analysis of the image and position of the user and inform of obstacles: for example on a crossing, cars approaching the crossing, red light, or that the user leaves the crossing lanes.

If a person approaches the crossing, the camera should be aimed at traffic lights. The phone recognizes the shape of the light (red or green figure) and informs the user about the colour. If the crossing does not have lights, users can use the module, which warns of approaching vehicles.

According to the creators, the application should, for example, recognize whether the approaching object is a vehicle - car, motorbike or even bicycle - or just a pedestrian crossing the road, because in this case, the device should not issue warnings. Research with the use of artificial intelligence will be conducted on the camera image analysis and identification of approaching objects.

In addition to recognizing traffic dangers, the application will be capable of determining a route to reach the destination and navigate the user.

The application is designed for smartphones that not only have GPS receivers and cameras, but also interfaces for the blind.

Wojdan explained that users moving around the city will not have his phone out - a bluetooth cam, from which the phone can receive the signal, can be attached to clothing. The phone can signal danger with information encoded in vibration or by a message tone.

"Each stage of the project will be consulted with the Polish Association of the Blind, and blind people. Otherwise we will not able to create a good application" - Boleslaw Tekielski of Transition Technologies, head of the iVirtualEye project development team noted.

"We can not guarantee 100 percent efficiency of this application, but we can guarantee high efficiency. It provides an additional information, on which a blind person can base his decision" - Wojdan emphasized.

For now, work is underway on GPS navigation module, the next planned step involves research on image processing.

The researchers assure that system such as iVirtualEye has not yet been developed anywhere in the world.

PAP - Science and Scholarship in Poland

last modification: 2011-09-06

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Virtual eye for smartphones for the blind

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