Kinect Cane System : Recognition Aid of Available Seats for the Visually Impaired

The present paper proposes an assistive system to help a visually impaired user find available seats that are not occupied by other persons. The system is composed of a white cane, a Microsoft Kinect sensor, a parametric speaker, and other components. The system can recognize available seats by use of a RANSAC-based depth-data processing technique and face recognition software. If available seats are found, the system notifies a visually impaired user about their positions by use of auralization technology based on a parametric speaker. The seat recognition method was evaluated in two hundred environments that include available and occupied seats. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed system was effective to assist visually impaired users in searching available seats for daily living environments.

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