title: A context-aware-based audio guidance system for blind people using a multimodal profile model.
abstract: A wearable guidance system is designed to provide context-dependent guidance messages to blind people while they traverse local pathways. The system is composed of three parts: moving scene analysis, walking context estimation and audio message delivery. The combination of a downward-pointing laser scanner and a camera is used to solve the challenging problem of moving scene analysis. By integrating laser data profiles and image edge profiles, a multimodal profile model is constructed to estimate jointly the ground plane, object locations and object types, by using a Bayesian network. The outputs of the moving scene analysis are further employed to estimate the walking context, which is defined as a fuzzy safety level that is inferred through a fuzzy logic model. Depending on the estimated walking context, the audio messages that best suit the current context are delivered to the user in a flexible manner. The proposed system is tested under various local pathway scenes, and the results confirm its efficiency in assisting blind people to attain autonomous mobility.
authors.affiliation: Electronic Engineering Department, Soongsil University, 511 Sangdo-Dong, Dongjak-Gu, Seoul 156-743, Korea. lqsdust@163.com.
authors.forename: Qing
authors.initials: Q
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.affiliation: Electronic Engineering Department, Soongsil University, 511 Sangdo-Dong, Dongjak-Gu, Seoul 156-743, Korea. young@ssu.ac.kr.
authors.forename: Youngjoon
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Han
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D001364:Awareness; D001499:Bayes Theorem; D017143:Fuzzy Logic; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D019987:Persons with Visual Disabilities; D016138:Walking