Staircase detection to guide visually impaired people: A hybrid approach

Abstract

Eyes and other visionary organs are essential to human physiology, due to their ability to receive and process subtle details to the brain. However, some individuals are unable to visually perceive things in the surroundings. These visually impaired people face various hinderances in the daily life, and cannot navigate themselves without guidance. To help them navigate around the surroundings, this paper develops a hybrid system for the detection of staircase and the ground, using a pre-trained model and an ultrasonic sensor. The proposed system consists of an ultrasonic sensor, an R-GBD camera, a raspberry pi and a buzzer fixed on a walking stick. During the detection process, staircase images are captured by an RGB-D camera and then compared with pre-trained template images. Finally, our system was applied to detect different staircase images under various conditions (e.g. dark and noise), and found to achieve an average accuracy of 98.73%. This research provides an effective aid to the visually impaired.