Towards a Sign-Based Indoor Navigation System for People with Visual Impairments

ABSTRACT

Navigation is a challenging task for many travelers with visual impairments. While a variety of GPS-enabled tools can provide wayfinding assistance in outdoor settings, GPS provides no useful localization information indoors. A variety of indoor navigation tools are being developed, but most of them require potentially costly physical infrastructure to be installed and maintained, or else the creation of detailed visual models of the environment. We report development of a new smartphone-based navigation aid, which combines inertial sensing, computer vision and floor plan information to estimate the user's location with no additional physical infrastructure and requiring only the locations of signs relative to the floor plan. A formative study was conducted with three blind volunteer participants demonstrating the feasibility of the approach and highlighting the areas needing improvement.

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Index Terms

• Computing methodologies

  • Artificial intelligence

    • Computer vision

      • Computer vision problems

        • Object recognition

• Human-centered computing

  • Accessibility

    • Accessibility systems and tools

  • Ubiquitous and mobile computing

    • Ubiquitous and mobile devices

      • Personal digital assistants

      • Smartphones