Object Identification for Visually Impaired

Objectives: This paper is based on a device that helps blind people to identify a set of objects used in everyday routine thereby enabling them to work independently. Method/Analysis: A new portable camera based method to recognize indoor objects for helping blind people is introduced. A more improvised algorithm called as the Coarse Description Technique has been employed. The coarse description technique can be implemented in two ways: Euclidian distance measurement method and another method that relies on semantic similarity measure modeled by means of Gaussian process estimation. Findings: The techniques used currently perform the recognition task by limiting it to a single predefined class of objects. The proposed concept in this paper utilizes a completely different alternative scheme termed as coarse description. Its main objective is to expand the recognition task to multiple objects and keep the processing period under control at the same time. While the Euclidian distance measurement method evaluates every image based on a matrix created using details regarding the pixels of each image, the Gaussian process estimation method compares images using a number of image attributes. Novelty/Improvement: PIC controller used in the existing system is replaced by a Raspberry Pi board which provides a computation speed twice as fast as the former.