An Architecture for Collision Risk Prediction for Visually Impaired People

The production of sensory substitution equipment for the visually impaired (VIP) is growing. The aim of this project is to understand the VIP context and predict the risks of collision for the VIP, following an analysis of the position, distance, size and motion of the objects present in their environment. This understanding is refined by data fusion steps applied to the Situation Awareness model to predict possible impacts in the near future. With this goal, a new architecture was designed, composed of systems that detect free passages, static objects, dynamic objects and the paths of these dynamic objects. The detected data was mapped into a 3D plane verifying positions and sizes. For the fusion, a method was developed that compared four more general classifiers in order to verify which presented greater reliability in the given context. These classifiers allowed inferences to be made when analyzing the risks of collision in different directions. The architecture designed for risk prediction is the main contribution of this project.