Assisting blind people to avoid obstacles: An wearable obstacle stereo feedback system based on 3D detection

A wearable Obstacle Stereo Feedback (OSF) System for the Blind people based on 3D space obstacle detection is presented to assist the navigation. The OSF system embedded with a depth sensor to perceive the in-front 3D spatial information in the form of point clouds. We implemented the downsampling Random Sample Consensus (RANSAC) algorithm to process the perceived point cloud, and detect the obstacles in front of the user. Finally, Head-Related Transfer Functions (HRTF) are applied to create the virtual stereo sound which represents the obstacles according to its coordinate in the 3D space. The experiment shows that OSF system can detect the obstacle in the indoor environment effectively and provides a feasible auditory perception to indicate the in-front safety zone for the blind user.