Pedestrian Detection with Wearable Cameras for the Blind: A Two-way Perspective
This addresses privacy and social acceptance issues for wearable assistive technology for blind people, but it is incremental as it builds on existing computer vision and user study methods.
The study tackled the tension between privacy concerns for sighted passersby and the need for pedestrian detection assistive technology for blind users, finding that factors like camera visibility and extracted information must be carefully considered to mitigate social tensions, based on an online survey with 206 participants and an in-person study with 10 blind and 40 sighted participants.
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 information. We conduct two studies: an online survey with MTurkers (N=206) and an in-person experience study between pairs of blind (N=10) and sighted (N=40) participants, where blind participants wear a working prototype for pedestrian detection and pass by sighted participants. Our results suggest that both of the perspectives of users and bystanders and the several factors mentioned above need to be carefully considered to mitigate potential social tensions.