Improving RealSense by Fusing Color Stereo Vision and Infrared Stereo Vision for the Visually Impaired

Abstract

The introduction of RGB-D sensor has attracted attention from researchers majored in computer vision. With real-time depth measurement provided by RGB-D sensor, a better navigational assistance than traditional aiding tools can be offered for visually impaired people. However, nowadays RGB-D sensor usually has a limited detecting range, and fails in performing depth measurement on objects with special surfaces, such as absorbing, specular, and transparent surfaces. In this paper, a novel algorithm using two RealSense R200 simultaneously to build a short-baseline color stereo vision system is developed. This algorithm enhances depth estimation by fusing color stereo depth map and original RealSense depth map, which is obtained by infrared stereo vision. Moreover, the minimum range is decreased by up to 84.6%, from 650mm to 100mm. We anticipate out algorithm to provide better assistance for visually impaired individuals.