A new mobile phone system architecture for the navigational travelling blind

This paper introduces a new mobile phone system architecture to aid the blind in travelling. The architecture has four main units: voice/speech recognition, Global Positioning System (GPS) and map services, ultrasonic sensor, and image processing service. These four subsystems function simultaneously within a single mobile device using web service interaction. The paper describes the instrument and component of the key design as well as implementation decisions. The feasibility of the architecture has been tested with Windows Phone 7 (HTC HD7), and cooperated with the real blind. Additionally, we have evaluated the performance of Hough Transform for straight line detection - the main component intensively using the processing power - and then we have optimized the Hough Transform to reduce the complexity leading to lower average response time.