A visual aid system for the blind based on RFID and fast symbol recognition

The blind can only get perceptive and audio information, which bring them huge barriers to action. Mobile devices could provide the blind great help. However, because of limited computation capacity of mobile device, many existing visual augmentation scheme can´t be migrated to embedded system. In this paper, we propose a kind of simple blind symbol and a visual aid system (VAS) for the visually impaired people. VAS is based on fast symbol recognition algorithm and RFID technology, which achieves good performance in embedded devices. VAS perceives all blind symbols in current scene and reports location information to blind by text-to-speech technology. We develop a prototype system, which consist of a mobile phone with camera and RFID reader. Test result in this paper shows that VAS gets good real-time effect under embedded platform, even though symbol database contains large number of symbol sample.