A Cloud-based Outdoor Assistive Navigation System for the Blind and Visually Impaired

Abstract

Safe navigation in non-familiar outdoor environments is a challenging activity for the blind and visually impaired (BVI) people. This work introduces a cloud-based outdoor assistive navigation system (COANS) for BVI people. The main goal of the system is to provide easy street navigation and help to make outdoor walk in non-familiar environment less stressful. Hardware part from the user-side includes an android-based mobile phone and an external low-cost L1 GPS receiver to improve position accuracy. Applying the technique known as Real Time Kinematic (RTK) ameliorates the issue of the user position estimation. Interaction between the application and the user is based on voice commands (user-side) and voice notifications (system-side), together with the user-friendly "shaking" and "swiping" commands. The test scenarios for the system include traffic light status detection, zebra crossing path detection, and a bench discovering within a short distance from the user. In order to evaluate overall system performance, two groups of tests have been conducted. One is for GPS location accuracy from RTKLib and the other is for server-client communication time. It shows the usability of the proposed COANS system.