Wearable multimodal interface for helping visually handicapped persons

Abstract

Handicapped Persons who partially or entirely lose their sensory for external stimuli struggle to lead on daily life due to lack of the ability of sensors. We propose a system to provide alternative sensory for visually handicapped persons with wearable multimodal interface. It acquires visual information with a variety of sensors, converts them to high-level information, and represents the information with alternative sensory such as sound or vibration. The system is mainly composed of two sub-systems. The first is obstacle detection and avoidance module with multiple ultrasound sensors and a tracker. It helps handicapped person to access to target place easily and safely. The second is stereo vision system to provide ability to track some target objects, to recognize persons around a user, and to understand color and gray-level of a specific object. Since our system is designed for wearable computers, visually handicapped persons carry and operate it very easily. © 2006 Springer-Verlag Berlin/Heidelberg.