Real-time 3D pointing gesture with Kinect for object-based navigation by the visually impaired

This paper presents a low-cost and natural Kinect-based Human-Computer Interaction system using 3D pointing gesture that assists visually impaired persons to navigate in indoor environments. Kinect is a state-of-art stereo-camera that plugs into the USB port of a standard computer, and comes with Microsoft developed SDK to facilitate application development. The proposed system will provide necessary information on the object that the user is pointing at, such as its distance from the user´s hand and the locations of nearby objects, from a database that is manually updated beforehand. The system is designed to help visually impaired persons to get used to a new indoor environment and explores the potential for applying Kinect to assistive technology in a broader way.