This paper presents a curated list of 90 objects essential for the navigation of blind and low-vision (BLV) individuals, encompassing road, sidewalk, and indoor environments. We develop the initial list by analyzing 21 publicly available videos featuring BLV individuals navigating various settings. Then, we refine the list through feedback from a focus group study involving blind, low-vision, and sighted companions of BLV individuals. A subsequent analysis reveals that most contemporary datasets used to train recent computer vision models contain only a small subset of the objects in our proposed list. Furthermore, we provide detailed object labeling for these 90 objects across 31 video segments derived from the original 21 videos. Finally, we make the object list, the 21 videos, and object labeling in the 31 video segments publicly available. This paper aims to fill the existing gap and foster the development of more inclusive and effective navigation aids for the BLV community.
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 an…
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 …
NYU Tandon School of Engineering（纽约大学坦登工程学院）；NYU Grossman School of Medicine（纽约大学格罗斯曼医学院）；Ratchasuda College Mahidol University（玛希敦大学拉差苏达学院）；Mahidol University（玛希敦大学）
Vision-based localization approaches now underpin newly emerging navigation pipelines for myriad use cases from robotics to assistive technologies. Compared to sensor-based solutions, vision-based localization does not require pre-installed sensor infrastructure, which is costly, time-consuming, and/or often infeasible at scale. Herein, we propose a novel vision-based localization pipeline for a specific use case: navigation support for end-users with blindness and low vision. Given a query image taken by an end-user on a mobile application, the pipeline leverages a visual place recognition (V…
Georgia Institute of Technology（佐治亚理工学院）；FAIR, Meta AI（元人工智能基础人工智能研究院）；Simon Fraser University（西蒙弗雷泽大学）；Google Research Atlanta（谷歌亚特兰大研究院）；Oregon State University（俄勒冈州立大学）
Animal navigation research posits that organisms build and maintain internal spatial representations, or maps, of their environment. We ask if machines -- specifically, artificial intelligence (AI) navigation agents -- also build implicit (or 'mental') maps. A positive answer to this question would (a) explain the surprising phenomenon in recent literature of ostensibly map-free neural-networks achieving strong performance, and (b) strengthen the evidence of mapping as a fundamental mechanism for navigation by intelligent embodied agents, whether they be biological or artificial. Unlike animal…
East China Normal University（华东师范大学）；University of Guelph（圭尔夫大学）；Ryerson University（瑞尔森大学）
For people who ardently love painting but unfortunately have visual impairments, holding a paintbrush to create a work is a very difficult task. People in this special group are eager to pick up the paintbrush, like Leonardo da Vinci, to create and make full use of their own talents. Therefore, to maximally bridge this gap, we propose a painting navigation system to assist blind people in painting and artistic creation. The proposed system is composed of cognitive system and guidance system. The system adopts drawing board positioning based on QR code, brush navigation based on target detectio…
Agents navigating in 3D environments require some form of memory, which should hold a compact and actionable representation of the history of observations useful for decision taking and planning. In most end-to-end learning approaches the representation is latent and usually does not have a clearly defined interpretation, whereas classical robotics addresses this with scene reconstruction resulting in some form of map, usually estimated with geometry and sensor models and/or learning. In this work we propose to learn an actionable representation of the scene independently of the targeted downs…
How can a robot navigate successfully in rich and diverse environments, indoors or outdoors, along office corridors or trails on the grassland, on the flat ground or the staircase? To this end, this work aims to address three challenges: (i) complex visual observations, (ii) partial observability of local visual sensing, and (iii) multimodal robot behaviors conditioned on both the local environment and the global navigation objective. We propose to train a neural network (NN) controller for local navigation via imitation learning. To tackle complex visual observations, we extract multi-scale s…
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…
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…
Audio-Guided Visual Perception for Audio-Visual Navigation
School of Computer Science and Technology, Xinjiang University（新疆大学计算机科学与技术学院）；Joint International Research Laboratory of Silk Road Multilingual Cognitive Computing（丝绸之路多语种认知计算国际联合实验室）；Tsinghua University（清华大学）；Tianjin University of Technology（天津工业大学）
We present an approach for identifying the most walkable direction for navigation using a hand-held camera. Our approach extracts semantically rich contextual information from the scene using a custom encoder-decoder architecture for semantic segmentation and models the spatial and temporal behavior of objects in the scene using a spatio-temporal graph. The system learns to minimize a cost function over the spatial and temporal object attributes to identify the most walkable direction. We construct a new annotated navigation dataset collected using a hand-held mobile camera in an unconstrained…
The proposed shopping assistant model SANIP is going to help blind persons to detect hand held objects and also to get a video feedback of the information retrieved from the detected and recognized objects. The proposed model consists of three python models i.e. Custom Object Detection, Text Detection and Barcode detection. For object detection of the hand held object, we have created our own custom dataset that comprises daily goods such as Parle-G, Tide, and Lays. Other than that we have also collected images of Cart and Exit signs as it is essential for any person to use a cart and also not…
Online multi-object tracking (MOT) is extremely important for high-level spatial reasoning and path planning for autonomous and highly-automated vehicles. In this paper, we present a modular framework for tracking multiple objects (vehicles), capable of accepting object proposals from different sensor modalities (vision and range) and a variable number of sensors, to produce continuous object tracks. This work is a generalization of the MDP framework for MOT, with some key extensions - First, we track objects across multiple cameras and across different sensor modalities. This is done by fusin…
UnitedVLN: Generalizable Gaussian Splatting for Continuous Vision-Language Navigation
Nanjing University of Science and Technology（南京理工大学）；Northwest Polytechnical University（西北工业大学）；The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen（香港中文大学（深圳））；Tsinghua University（清华大学）
Development and Evaluation of an AI-Driven Telemedicine System for Prenatal Healthcare
BiomedLab, Biomedical Engineering Institute, Universidad Galileo（生物医学实验室、生物医学工程研究所、加勒比大学）；Faculty of Medicine, Universidad Francisco Marroquín（医学学院、弗朗西斯科·马罗亲大学）
