Android-based object recognition application for visually impaired

Abstract

Detecting objects in real-time and converting them into an audio output was a challenging task. Recent advancement in computer vision has allowed the development of various real-time object detection applications. This paper describes a simple android app that would help the visually impaired people in understanding their surroundings. The information about the surrounding environment was captured through a phone’s camera where real-time object recognition through tensorflow’s object detection API was done. The detected objects were then converted into an audio output by using android’s text-to-speech library. Tensorflow lite made the offline processing of complex algorithms simple. The overall accuracy of the proposed system was found to be approximately 90%.