Guardian Angel: A Novel Walking Aid for the Visually Impaired
This work addresses safety for visually impaired people in traffic, but it is incremental as it applies existing methods to a new application.
The authors tackled the problem of assisting visually impaired individuals in complex traffic environments by developing Guardian Angel, an Android app that uses object detection, distance estimation, and moving direction estimation to alert users of potential dangers. The result showed that user satisfaction scores improved with the app's assistance under a 99% confidence level, though crossing times did not show a significant difference.
This work introduces Guardian Angel, an Android App that assists visually impaired people to avoid danger in complex traffic environment. The system, consisting of object detection by pretrained YOLO model, distance estimation and moving direction estimation, provides information about surrounding vehicles and alarms users of potential danger without expensive special purpose device. With an experiment of 8 subjects, we corroborate that in terms of satisfaction score in pedestrian-crossing experiment with the assistance of our App using a smartphone is better than when without under 99% confidence level. The time needed to cross a road is shorter on average with the assistance of our system, however, not reaching significant difference by our experiment. The App has been released in Google Play Store, open to the public for free.