An electronic travel aid for navigation of visually impaired persons

This paper presents an electronic travel aid for blind people to navigate safely and quickly, an obstacle detection system using ultrasonic sensors and USB camera based visual navigation has been considered. The proposed system detects the obstacles up to 300 cm via sonar and sends feedback (beep sound) to inform the person about its location. In addition to this, an USB webcam is connected with eBox 2300™ Embedded System for capturing the field of view of the user, which is used for finding the properties of the obstacle in particular, in the context of this work, locating a human being. Identification of human presence is based on face detection and cloth texture analysis. The major constraints for these algorithms to run on Embedded System are small image frame (160×120) having reduced faces, limited memory and very less processing time available to achieve real time image processing requirements. The algorithms are implemented in C++ using Visual Studio 5.0 IDE, which runs on Windows CE™ environment.