Vision-based distance estimation method using single camera: Application to the assistance of visually impaired people

Abstract

In this paper, we test, implement and evaluate different distance calculation methods to determine the best method for computing the distance of obstacle to the visually impaired user. This work will be important for visually impaired people, it provides a significant information about the obstacles such as the type and distance of the obstacle in unknown environments from partial visual information based on computer vision techniques. In order to determine the distance with low complexity and high accuracy, among the existing distance calculation methods, we adopt three methods to calculate the distance of obstacle using a single camera. Also, to increase the awareness of the explored environment, we provide experimental results concerned with several aspects of distance calculation method. The experimental results show that the relative error between the detected viewing distance and the actual viewing distance of the used method is within −0.36 to −1.81%.