Angel Girl of Visually Impaired Artists: Painting Navigation System for Blind or Visually Impaired Painters

For those who love painting but unfortunately have visual impairments, holding a paintbrush to create a work is really a difficult task. For the purpose of solving this problem, a painting navigation system for visually impaired painters is introduced through the live demonstration. When painting, the developed system can endow visually impaired persons with the ability to perceive the surrounding environment, thus helping them realize their dream of painting. To achieve this goal, we designed four main modules viz., QR code based drawing board positioning module, brush real-time positioning module, color recognition module and human-computer interaction module, and integrated them into the system. In the validation experiments, the blindfolded users can successfully create a painting with the help of the developed navigation system. Moreover, the users told us that this system provided them with good experience. In a way, this painting navigation system can be seen as "angel’s eyes" of visually impaired painters. The demo video of the proposed painting navigation system is available at: https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.9760004.v1.