Pathfinding for the navigation of visually impaired people

Abstract

A navigation system using an Android mobile device for the visually impaired is explored in this paper. This paper focuses on pathfinding algorithms and their implementations on Java platform. The boundary iterative-deepening depth-first search (BIDDFS) pathfinding algorithm is extended for bidirectional searching. Fast pathfinding is applied for the BIDDFS by reducing memory read and writes cycles, proposing the optimised BIDDFS. Fast pathfinding is also extended for the bidirectional BIDDFS, proposing the fast bidirectional BIDDFS. The fast bidirectional BIDDFS uses Java's thread feature to implement a parallel structure. The optimised BIDDFS was able to record drastic improvements in pathfinding speeds compared to the standard BIDDFS. Likewise, the fast bidirectional BIDDFS recorded significant speed improvements over the parallel bidirectional BIDDFS.