Title: Smart Guiding Glasses for Visually Impaired People in Indoor Environment,
Abstract: To overcome the travelling difficulty for the visually impaired group, this
paper presents a novel ETA (Electronic Travel Aids)-smart guiding device in the
shape of a pair of eyeglasses for giving these people guidance efficiently and
safely. Different from existing works, a novel multi sensor fusion based
obstacle avoiding algorithm is proposed, which utilizes both the depth sensor
and ultrasonic sensor to solve the problems of detecting small obstacles, and
transparent obstacles, e.g. the French door. For totally blind people, three
kinds of auditory cues were developed to inform the direction where they can go
ahead. Whereas for weak sighted people, visual enhancement which leverages the
AR (Augment Reality) technique and integrates the traversable direction is
adopted. The prototype consisting of a pair of display glasses and several low
cost sensors is developed, and its efficiency and accuracy were tested by a
number of users. The experimental results show that the smart guiding glasses
can effectively improve the user's travelling experience in complicated indoor
environment. Thus it serves as a consumer device for helping the visually
impaired people to travel safely.