Digital Sign System for Indoor Wayfinding for the Visually Impaired

TLDR

Mobility challenges and independent travel are major concerns for blind and visually impaired pedestrians, especially in unfamiliar indoor environments where they lack access to maps, signs, and orienting devices, and current assistive technologies are limited by the lack of reliable, cost‑efficient indoor location methods. The study designs a digital sign system using low‑cost passive retro‑reflective tags to aid indoor wayfinding for the visually impaired. The system employs a handheld camera and machine‑vision to detect and identify the tags. Prototype performance showed the tag detection/recognition system could cope with the real‑world environment of a typical building.

Abstract

Mobility challenges and independent travel are major concerns for blind and visually impaired pedestrians [1][2]. Navigation and wayfinding in unfamiliar indoor environments are particularly challenging because blind pedestrians do not have ready access to building maps, signs and other orienting devices. The development of assistive technologies to aid wayfinding is hampered by the lack of a reliable and costefficient method for providing location information in an indoor environment. Here we describe the design and implementation of a digital sign system based on low-cost passive retro-reflective tags printed with specially designed patterns that can be readily detected and identified by a handheld camera and machine-vision system. Performance of the prototype showed the tag detection/recognition system could cope with the real-world environment of a typical building.