Obstacle Avoidance Feedback System for the Blind using Stereo Sound

There are number of research dedicated to offer solutions to detect obstacles for the blinds. However, most gave their focus on the detection tasks rather than the feedback. The current feedback algorithms range from a simple non-speech beeping sound, to non-speech with distance, non-speech with direction, to words describing the location of the objects. In this paper, we propose a new option for the feedback system using non-speech stereo sound to offer more information about the direction, distance, and size with the advantage of stereo sound. The users would be able to understand all three pieces of information at once, We use the combination of different amplitude to tell the distance, duration to tell size, and frequency together with stereo sound to tell the direction. Our experiment shows that participants are able to identify the distance and the direction of the obstacles with correct rate of 92.86% and 87.72% and they are able to avoid those obstacles 75% of the time when they walk toward the goal.