Abstract

Recent advances in mobile technology have the potential to radically change the quality of tools available for people with sensory impairments, in particular the blind. Nowadays almost every smart-phone and tablet is equipped with high resolutions cameras, which are typically used for photos and videos, communication purposes, games and virtual reality applications. Very little has been proposed to exploit these sensors for user localisation and navigation instead. To this end, the “Active Vision with Human-in-the-Loop for the Visually Impaired” (ActiVis) project aims to develop a novel electronic travel aid to tackle the “last 10 yards problem” and enable the autonomous navigation of blind users in unknown environments, ultimately enhancing or replacing existing solutions, such as guide dogs and white canes. This paper describes some of the key project’s challenges, in particular with respect to the design of the user interface that translate visual information from the camera to guiding instructions for the blind person, taking into account limitations due to the visual impairment and proposing a multimodal interface that embeds human-machine co-adaptation.