Bionic eyeglass: An audio guide for visually impaired

Abstract

A bionic eyeglass is proposed in this paper, a device that helps blind and visually impaired people in basic tasks of their everyday life by converting visual information into speech. The indoor and outdoor situations and tasks have been selected by a technical committee consisting of blind and visually impaired persons, considering their most important needs and potential practical benefits that an audio guide can provide. Two types of cellular wave computing algorithms are used: general spatial-temporal event detection by analogic subroutines, and recently developed multi-channel mammalian retinal model followed by a classifier. The basic idea is to mimic the way the nervous system discriminates relevant information from the irrelevant - namely realize an attention model. Typical indoor and outdoor event detection processes are considered and explained through examples. We present advances in adaptive color processing and number recognition.