Scientific Voyage, Volume - 2, Issue - 1

Date Of Publication - July, 2016

INDOOR NAVIGATION SYSTEM FOR VISUAL IMPAIRED (INSVI)

Prof. Sudipta Bhadra1 , Prof. Anindya Jyoti Pal2 and Mr. Sk Irfan Tanveer3

1. Assistant Professor, Information Technology, Heritage Institute of Technology, Kolkata, India

2. Associate Professor, Information Technology, Heritage Institute of Technology, Kolkata, India

3. M.Tech Student, Information Technology, Heritage Institute of Technology, Kolkata, India

Email for Correspondence: sudipta.bhadra@heritageit.edu

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Abstract:

Visually impaired people face a common problem of independent mobility in a

familiar/unfamiliar indoor environment. At present almost 8.90 Cr. Indian are visually impaired.
Majority of those cannot travel independently. In this paper we have described a system that
facilitates visually impaired person to move in any indoor environment. The system is named as
INDOOR NAVIGATION SYSTEM FOR VISUAL IMPAIRED (INSVI). The system can also be
used by users with cognitive disabilities. We have created a simple and less costly system by
eliminate the installation expenditure and minimize the amount of sensors required for the system.
The goal of our system is to detect and avoid obstacles. Our system also provides the necessary
instructions to visually impaired persons for navigation within a building. Visual impaired
peoples real world navigation experience can be increased by our prototype by vocal navigation
instructions. Our system can replace conventional techniques of avoid obstacles such as guide dog
and long cane. Advances in computer vision like invention of Kinect depth sensor have made our
goal possible. The system has mainly two major process data extraction and navigation process.
Kinect camera facilitates our systems data extraction by capture and analysis of image. This
range camera gives us the distance value of obstacle from camera for each pixel in a particular
frame. The navigation process uses two key pieces of information first direction of users
movement and second position of objects in the environment. Our system can be connected with
Internet for Internet of Things based implementation for remote assistance.
Keyword : Computer Vision, Kinect Camera, Indoor Navigation, Atmega8, L293D.

1. Introduction

World Health Organization has published a information sheet that approximate 285 million
people are visually impaired worldwide. Among them 39 million people are blind and 246 have
low vision. 90% of the visual impaired people can't travel alone. They have problems such as
present location and orientation awareness. Their navigation capability is very low. The
problems are enormous and critical. Assistance system for visual impaired persons is the need of
the time to overcome their difficulty.In our work, we have presented a low cost and easy to use
system for detection and avoidance of obstacles that assists visually impaired persons in their
movement. Our system can help the users to navigate with accuracy in indoor environments. Our
system does not need any pre-loaded indoor maps. This system uses kinect camera and
algorithms that analyze the collected data of camera and give audio instruction to a user. The
main objective is to capture images to determine the obstacles in the path.

2. Problem domain

GPS based commercial navigation system provides effortless navigation for the visual impaired
person in a outdoor environments. Main problem of this kind of system is that they cannot detect
specific landmarks and may not applicable for the indoor environment. The presence of narrow
hallways, stairs, doors and pieces of furniture have made traveling a difficult task in an indoor
environment. It is impossible for visual impaired to travel alone in a new indoor environment.

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The blind people may get traditional help from guide dog or long cane but those are not enough
for indoor navigation. Navigation depends on the position and orientation for an intended
destination. A system is required which can provide the useful inputs like the orientation, the
location, warnings about immediate obstacles ahead and step-by-step guidance to a destination
using optimal route. It should facilitate user with contextual guidance information about the
obstacles. An optimal route is not essentially the shortest path for travel safely.
Focus of our work is to create a portable, simple, and less costly system that will allow visually
impaired individuals to travel through the indoor environments. The system consists of the
following functional components: (1) a module for determining the obstacles (2) avoid obstacles
in the path (3) voice based assistance to the user.

3. Related work

The research work focused on indoor environments navigation have proposed several techniques
to give necessary assistance to the user[2]. Some of them are suitable for visual impaired people.
Sonnenblick [15] has implemented a indoor navigation system based on the infrared LEDs.
Those strategically located LEDs are used by the blind person as guides. Those LEDs signal is
captured and interpreted by a special receptor device. The receptor device must point directly at
the infrared LEDs. Hub, Diepstraten and Ertl [6] developed a system to determine the position of
obstacles and individuals in an indoor environment. That system mainly uses the cameras to
detect objects and direction sensors to recognize the direction of the user. The major drawback of
that proposal is the accessibility of the technology which enables the user to interact with the
environment. Hub, Hartter and Ertl [7] have further enhanced their previous proposal and
included in the system. Their modified system is capable to track several types of mobile objects.
Treuillet and Royer [17] proposed a vision-based navigation system in indoor and outdoor
environments. The positioning system uses a camera to locate people in memorized paths. Real-
time recognition of indoor scenes in the robotic and artificial intelligence fields has studied very
frequently [1,4,12,14]. Some solutions are depend on the dynamic reference map, e.g., the
vision-based systems proposed by Davison et al. [3] and Strasdat et al. [16], or the ultrasound
positioning system developed by Ran et al. [13].Those systems are useful in other domains but
main problem associated with indoor navigation domain of visual impaired person is that they
need to carry non wearable extra gadgets with normal white cane. This problem is resolved by
the solution proposed by Hesch and Roumeliotis [5]. They has developed a sensor mounted
white cane.Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) based system has been proposed by the
authors[9,10] that allows a blind person to follow a route of RFID labels with the RFID mounted
white cane. Kulyukin et al. [8] propose a similar solution with a robot instead of the white cane.
Na [11] has proposed a system, named BIGS (for Blind Interactive Guide System), consists of a
PDA, a RFID reader, and several tags deployed in the floor. The main drawbacks of using RFID-
based solutions are (1) the reconfiguration of the system for a new environment is difficult in
respect of time and cost (2) the users use predefined path.

4. System design
The goal of this design is to build a system which is able to locate and avoid obstacles as well as
provide audio instructions to visually impaired/disabled persons for navigation within a building.
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The system is named as INSVI. INSVI have a small robot like structure with three wheels. It
have one caster wheel at the front and two wheel connected with two motor at the back. One
Kinect camera is placed in the upper berth of INSVI. The Intel i3 Processor and Atmega8 are
placed in the lower berth of INSVI. Kinect camera is connecter with the laptop (Intel i3
processor) and Atmega8 is also connected with the processor. Two motors are connected with
L293D motor driver which is connected with the laptop via Atmega8.
Kinect camera takes image of environment in an interval of 10ms. Intel i3 processor processes
the image taken by Kinect camera and identifies objects and its distance from camera. Intel i3
processor take decision and send voice message to user in real time if there is any obstacle in the
path of INSVI. It also sends an control instruction to L293D motor driver via Atmega8
microcontroller for necessary wheels moves to avoid obstacles towards safe path.

Figure 1: Side View of INSVI Figure 2: Front View of INSVI

Intel i3
Kinect USB Processor USB FTDI
Camera FT232R

Serial
Atmega8

L293D

Figure 3 : Block Diagram Of INSVI Motor1 Motor2

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5. Experimental Result:

The INSVI system described in this paper has been tested in an indoor environment with six
cases as mentioned below. We have take -20 to +20 coordinate area as a subject area for testing
purpose.

Case 1 : There is no obstacle in front of INSVI.

Solution : INSVI will move forward and send a voice message to user.

Figure 4 : Experimental Result - Case 1

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Case 2 :
There is no obstacle in front of INSVI (Region between x=-20 to 20).
Solution : INSVI will move forward and send a voice message to user.

Figure 5 : Experimental Result - Case 2

Case 3 :
There is an obstacle in front of INSVI (Region between x=-20 to 20).
There is also an obstacle in left side (Region x<-20)
Solution :

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INSVI will turn right and send a voice message to user.

Figure 6 : Experimental Result - Case 3

Case 4 :
There is an obstacle in front of INSVI (Region between x=-20 to 20).
There is also an obstacle in right side (Region x>20)

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Solution :
INSVI will turn left and send a voice message to user.

Figure 7 : Experimental Result - Case 4

6. Summary and future work

Presently India is home to the world's largest number of blind people. Few years back
visually impaired people prefer to not use electronic aids, and use only white canes or guide
dogs. The main reasons for this include high costs and poor levels of user satisfaction. So we
have tried to develop a low cost and user friendly system. In this project we have used Intel
i3 Processor but single board Intel Atom/Intel Galileo Processor are much more appropriate.
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We have used Kinect camera for obstacle detection. Our system cannot work in outdoor
environment because Kinect camera does not work perfectly in sunlight.

There is a potential amount of scope for future improvements to our current implementation
in respect to following points.

a) Obstacle detection in outdoor environment

b) Path Planning
c) Internet of things based remote assistance

7. References
[1] Bosch, A.; Muoz, X.; Mart, R., 2007, A review: Which is the best way to organize/classify
images by content? Image Vis. Comput., 25, 778791.

[2] Bradley, N.A.; Dunlop, M.D., 2005, An experimental investigation into wayfinding
directions for visually impaired people. Pers. Ubiquitous Comput. 9, 395403.

[3] Davison, A.J.; Reid, I.D.; Molton, N.D.; Stasse, O., 2007, MonoSLAM: Real-time single
camera SLAM. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell., 29, 10521067.

[4] Espinace, P.; Kollar, T.; Roy, N.; Soto, A., 2010, Indoor Scene Recognition through Object
Detection. In Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and
Automation, Anchorage, AK, USA, 38, pp. 14061413.

[5] Hesch, J.A.; Roumeliotis, S.I., 2010, Design and analysis of a portable indoor localization aid
for the visually impaired. Int. J. Robot. Res.29, 14001415.

[6] Hub, A.; Diepstraten, J.; Ertl, T., 2004 Design and Development of an Indoor Navigation and
Object Identification System for the Blind. In Proceedings of the ACM SIGACCESS Conference
on Computers and Accessibility, Atlanta, GA, USA, 1820 pp. 147152.
[7] Hub, A.; Hartter, T.; Ertl, T., 2006 Interactive Localization and Recognition of Objects for
the Blind. In Proceedings of the 21st Annual Conference on Technology and Persons with
Disabilities, Los Angeles, CA, USA, 2225, pp. 14.
[8] Kulyukin, V.; Gharpure, C.; Nicholson, J.; Pavithran, S., 2004, RFID in Robot Assisted
Indoor Navigation for the Visually Impaired. In Proceedings of the IEEE International
Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems, Sandai, Japan, 28 September2, pp. 19791984.
[9] Lpez-de-Ipia, D.; Lorido, T.; Lpez, U., (2011,a) BlindShopping: Enabling Accessible
Shopping for Visually Impaired People through Mobile Technologies. In Proceedings of the 9th
International Conference on Smart Homes and Health Telematics, Montreal, Canada, 2022,
LNCS 6719, pp. 266270.

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[10] Lpez-de-Ipia, D.; Lorido, T.; Lpez, U., (2011,b) , Indoor Navigation and Product
Recognition for Blind People Assisted Shopping. In Proceedings of the 3rd International
Workshop on Ambient Assisted Living, Malaga, Spain, 810; LNCS 6693, pp. 3340.
[11] Na, J., 2006, The Blind Interactive Guide System Using RFID-Based Indoor Positioning
System. In Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Computers Helping People with
Special Needs, Linz, Austria, 1113,; LNCS 4061, pp. 12981305.
[12] Quattoni, A.; Torralba, A. Recognizing Indoor Scenes., 2009, In Proceedings of the IEEE
Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, Miami, FL, USA, 2025. pp. 413
420.
[13] Ran, L.; Helal, S.; Moore, S., 2004, Drishti: An Integrated Indoor/Outdoor Blind Navigation
System and Service. In Proceedings of the 2nd Annual Conference on Pervasive Computing and
Communications, Orlando, FL, USA, 1417, pp. 2332.
[14] Santofimia, M.J.; Fahlman, S.E.; del Toro, X.; Moya, F.; Lpez, J.C., 2011, A semantic
model for actions and events in ambient intelligence. Eng. Appl. Artif. Intell.24, 14321445.
[15] Sonnenblick, Y., 1998, An Indoor Navigation System for Blind Individuals. In Proceedings
of the 13th Annual Conference on Technology and Persons with Disabilities, Los Angeles, CA,
USA, 1721, pp. 215224.
[16] Strasdat, H.; Montiel, J.M.; Davison, A.J., 2010, Real-Time Monocular SLAM: Why Filter?
In Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE International Conference on Robotics and Automation (ICRA),
Anchorage, AK, USA, 38, pp. 26572664.
[17] Treuillet, S.; Royer, E., 2010, Outdoor/indoor vision-based localization for blind pedestrian
navigation assistance. Int. J. Image Graph., 10, 481496.

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