X-EYE: A Bio-smart Secure Navigation Framework for Visually Impaired People

Abstract

This paper presents an effective method of providing day-to-day mobility aid to visually impaired people. An android application named X-EYE using LOOXCIE wearable camera is designed for blind people to navigate safely. Existing navigation aid systems use various hardware components such as sensors that are expensive and cause health hazards. The proposed system presents an economical solution using a wearable camera and a smart phone to provide safe navigation facility to the visually impaired user. X-EYE provides the features of obstacle detection, person recognition, location tracking and sharing, SMS reader, and language translation. Audio messages are specifically generated to provide better usability to the blind/visually impaired user. The proposed system is robust to egocentric video limitations i.e. partial appearance of objects, sudden background change, jitter effects, and illumination conditions. Performance of the proposed method is evaluated on ten real-time egocentric videos. Experimental results indicate the effectiveness of our method in terms of providing safe mobility service to the visually impaired people.