To help the blind people walk to the destination efficiently and safely in indoor environment, a novel wearable navigation device is presented in this paper. The locating, way-finding, route following and obstacle avoiding modules are the essential components in a navigation system, while it remains a challenging task to consider obstacle avoiding during route following, as the indoor environment is complex, changeable and possibly with dynamic objects. To address this issue, we propose a novel scheme which utilizes a dynamic sub-goal selecting strategy to guide the users to the destination and help them bypass obstacles at the same time. This scheme serves as the key component of a complete navigation system deployed on a pair of wearable optical see-through glasses for the ease of use of blind people's daily walks. The proposed navigation device has been tested on a collection of individuals and proved to be effective on indoor navigation tasks. The sensors embedded are of low cost, small volume and easy integration, making it possible for the glasses to be widely used as a wearable consumer device.
We introduce 2D blind spot estimation as a critical visual task for road scene understanding. By automatically detecting road regions that are occluded from the vehicle's vantage point, we can proactively alert a manual driver or a self-driving system to potential causes of accidents (e.g., draw attention to a road region from which a child may spring out). Detecting blind spots in full 3D would be challenging, as 3D reasoning on the fly even if the car is equipped with LiDAR would be prohibitively expensive and error prone. We instead propose to learn to estimate blind spots in 2D, just from …
Transportation & Autonomous Systems Institute (TASI), IUPUI（印第安纳大学与普渡大学印第安纳波利斯联合分校交通与自动驾驶系统研究所）；Collaborative Safety Research Center (CSRC), Toyota Motor North America (TMNA)（丰田汽车北美公司合作安全研究中心）
As one of the most popular micro-mobility options, e-scooters are spreading in hundreds of big cities and college towns in the US and worldwide. In the meantime, e-scooters are also posing new challenges to traffic safety. In general, e-scooters are suggested to be ridden in bike lanes/sidewalks or share the road with cars at the maximum speed of about 15-20 mph, which is more flexible and much faster than the pedestrains and bicyclists. These features make e-scooters challenging for human drivers, pedestrians, vehicle active safety modules, and self-driving modules to see and interact. To stu…
New York University（纽约大学）；NYU Tandon School of Engineering（纽约大学坦登工程学院）；New York University Abu Dhabi（纽约大学阿布扎比分校）；NYU Langone Health（纽约大学朗格尼医学中心）
People with blindness and low vision (pBLV) experience significant challenges when locating final destinations or targeting specific objects in unfamiliar environments. Furthermore, besides initially locating and orienting oneself to a target object, approaching the final target from one's present position is often frustrating and challenging, especially when one drifts away from the initial planned path to avoid obstacles. In this paper, we develop a novel wearable navigation solution to provide real-time guidance for a user to approach a target object of interest efficiently and effectively …
University of Maryland（马里兰大学）；Carnegie Mellon University（卡内基梅隆大学）；New York University（纽约大学）；IBM Research（IBM研究院）
Blind people have limited access to information about their surroundings, which is important for ensuring one's safety, managing social interactions, and identifying approaching pedestrians. With advances in computer vision, wearable cameras can provide equitable access to such information. However, the always-on nature of these assistive technologies poses privacy concerns for parties that may get recorded. We explore this tension from both perspectives, those of sighted passersby and blind users, taking into account camera visibility, in-person versus remote experience, and extracted visual …
G H Patel College of Engineering and Technology（G H帕特尔工程技术学院）
Roads in medium-sized Indian towns often have lots of traffic but no (or disregarded) traffic stops. This makes it hard for the blind to cross roads safely, because vision is crucial to determine when crossing is safe. Automatic and reliable image-based safety classifiers thus have the potential to help the blind to cross Indian roads. Yet, we currently lack datasets collected on Indian roads from the pedestrian point-of-view, labelled with road crossing safety information. Existing classifiers from other countries are often intended for crossroads, and hence rely on the detection and presence…
Consider an assistive system that guides visually impaired users through speech and haptic feedback to their destination. Existing robotic and ubiquitous navigation technologies (e.g., portable, ground, or wearable systems) often operate in a generic, user-agnostic manner. However, to minimize confusion and navigation errors, our real-world analysis reveals a crucial need to adapt the instructional guidance across different end-users with diverse mobility skills. To address this practical issue in scalable system design, we propose a novel model-based reinforcement learning framework for perso…
Outdoor shopping complexes (OSC) are extremely difficult for people with visual impairment to navigate. Existing GPS devices are mostly designed for roadside navigation and seldom transition well into an OSC-like setting. We report our study on the challenges faced by a blind person in navigating OSC through developing a new mobile application named iExplore. We first report an exploratory study aiming at deriving specific design principles for building this system by learning the unique challenges of the problem. Then we present a methodology that can be used to derive the necessary informati…
Computer Vision for Human-Computer Interaction Lab（人机交互计算机视觉实验室）；Center for Digital Accessibility and Assistive Technology, Karlsruhe Institute of Technology（卡尔斯鲁厄理工学院数字无障碍与辅助技术中心）
Transparent objects, such as glass walls and doors, constitute architectural obstacles hindering the mobility of people with low vision or blindness. For instance, the open space behind glass doors is inaccessible, unless it is correctly perceived and interacted with. However, traditional assistive technologies rarely cover the segmentation of these safety-critical transparent objects. In this paper, we build a wearable system with a novel dual-head Transformer for Transparency (Trans4Trans) perception model, which can segment general- and transparent objects. The two dense segmentation result…
In near future, vulnerable road users (VRUs) such as cyclists and pedestrians will be equipped with smart devices and wearables which are capable to communicate with intelligent vehicles and other traffic participants. Road users are then able to cooperate on different levels, such as in cooperative intention detection for advanced VRU protection. Smart devices can be used to detect intentions, e.g., an occluded cyclist intending to cross the road, to warn vehicles of VRUs, and prevent potential collisions. This article presents a human activity recognition approach to detect the starting move…
Common fully glazed facades and transparent objects present architectural barriers and impede the mobility of people with low vision or blindness, for instance, a path detected behind a glass door is inaccessible unless it is correctly perceived and reacted. However, segmenting these safety-critical objects is rarely covered by conventional assistive technologies. To tackle this issue, we construct a wearable system with a novel dual-head Transformer for Transparency (Trans4Trans) model, which is capable of segmenting general and transparent objects and performing real-time wayfinding to assis…
