SoundView: an auditory guidance system based on environment understanding for the visually impaired people.
Without visual information, the blind people live in various hardships with shopping, reading, finding objects and etc. Therefore, we developed a portable auditory guide system, called SoundView, for visually impaired people. This prototype system consists of a mini-CCD camera, a digital signal processing unit and an earphone, working with built-in customizable auditory coding algorithms. Employing environment understanding techniques, SoundView processes the images from a camera and detects objects tagged with barcodes. The recognized objects in the environment are then encoded into stereo speech signals for the blind though an earphone. The user would be able to recognize the type, motion state and location of the interested objects with the help of SoundView. Compared with other visual assistant techniques, SoundView is object-oriented and has the advantages of cheap cost, smaller size, light weight, low power consumption and easy customization.
Nie
Min
M
Department of Biomedical Engineering, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, Shanghai 200240, P.R. China.
Ren
Jie
J
Li
Zhengjun
Z
Niu
Jinhai
J
Qiu
Yihong
Y
Zhu
Yisheng
Y
Tong
Shanbao
S
D000162:Acoustics; D001698:Biomedical Engineering; D001766:Blindness / Q000534:rehabilitation*; D004777:Environment; D004867:Equipment Design; D006801:Humans; D012682:Sensory Aids; D012815:Signal Processing, Computer-Assisted; D012984:Software; D014584:User-Computer Interface