Title : 
An intelligent assistant for navigation of visually impaired people
         
        
            Author : 
Bourbakis, N.G. ; Kavraki, D.
         
        
            Author_Institution : 
AIIS Inc., Vestal, NY, USA
         
        
        
        
        
        
            Abstract : 
This paper presents the navigation methodology employed by an intelligent assistant (agent) for people with disabilities. In particular, the intelligent assistant, called Tyflos, would help a visually impaired user to be partially independent and able to walk and work in a 3D dynamic environment. The Tyflos system carries two vision cameras and captures images from the surrounding 3D environment, either by the user´s command or in a continuous mode (video), then it converts these images into verbal descriptions for each image into a verbal communication with the user. In other words the system plays the role of human assistant, who describes to the user the 3D visual environment
         
        
            Keywords : 
computer vision; handicapped aids; knowledge representation; navigation; software agents; stereo image processing; 3D dynamic environment; Tyflos; agent; image capture; intelligent assistant; navigation methodology; verbal descriptions; vision cameras; visually impaired people; Artificial intelligence; Humans; Image converters; Intelligent agent; Intelligent robots; Legged locomotion; Machine intelligence; Machine vision; Navigation; Robot vision systems;
         
        
        
        
            Conference_Titel : 
Bioinformatics and Bioengineering Conference, 2001. Proceedings of the IEEE 2nd International Symposium on
         
        
            Conference_Location : 
Bethesda, MD
         
        
            Print_ISBN : 
0-7695-1423-5
         
        
        
            DOI : 
10.1109/BIBE.2001.974434