Title :
Adaptive saliency-weighted obstacle detection for the visually challenged
Author :
Poddar, Anindya ; Ahmed, S. Tanveer ; Puhan, N.B.
Author_Institution :
Sch. of Electr. Sci., Indian Inst. of Technol. Bhubaneswar, Bhubaneswar, India
Abstract :
This paper focuses on distinguishing obstacles from free regions towards navigation of the visually challenged. This is an important and challenging research problem due to the unconstrained navigating environment containing diverse obstacles. It is necessary to detect if any obstacles are lying ahead in advance with high precision which will result in a warning to the person. We first implement Ulrich´s classical obstacle detection method and find its detection accuracy to be high. However, the higher false positive rate for free path detection motivates us to improve the method. Instead of just comparing reference area with region of interest, we embed the saliency information after adaptive computation of histogram-based saliency threshold. The weightage of initial obstacle map with thresholded saliency information results in a much accurate and desirable obstacle map. The experimental results with a newly created database of unconstrained indoor and outdoor images support the claims made in the paper.
Keywords :
adaptive systems; biomedical optical imaging; handicapped aids; image classification; medical disorders; medical image processing; medical information systems; navigation; object detection; vision defects; visual databases; Ulrich classical obstacle detection method; adaptive computation; adaptive saliency-weighted obstacle detection; free path detection; high false positive rate; high obstacle detection accuracy; high precision obstacle detection; histogram-based saliency threshold computation; initial obstacle map weightage; obstacle map accuracy; obstacle variation; reference area comparison; region of interest comparison; saliency information embedding; thresholded saliency information; unconstrained indoor image database; unconstrained navigating environment; unconstrained outdoor image database; visually challenged navigation; warning; Accuracy; Histograms; Image color analysis; Laser radar; Navigation; Sensors; Visualization; navigation; obstacle; saliency; saliency threshold; spectral residual; vision; visually challenged;
Conference_Titel :
Signal Processing and Integrated Networks (SPIN), 2015 2nd International Conference on
Conference_Location :
Noida
Print_ISBN :
978-1-4799-5990-7
DOI :
10.1109/SPIN.2015.7095312