Development of a Navigation System Using MY VISION for Visually Impaired People – A Method to Guide the Direction of Travel

The number of visually impaired people in Japan as of 2016 was 312,000, and 70.4% of them have experienced accidents such as falls or collisions while going out. In addition, while a white walking cane is commonly used to move around when going out, there is a problem of not being able to recognize a wide range of areas. Many studies have been conducted to support the movement of visually impaired people using camera images, and many methods have been proposed to support walking on sidewalks and crossing intersections. However, when considering walking on a sidewalk, there are cases where the sidewalk is broken by a side street intersecting the roadway, and few studies have focused on such a break in the sidewalk. In many cases, there are no traffic signals or pedestrian crossings at such breaks in the sidewalk, making them dangerous places for people with vision difficulties. In this study, we propose a walking assistance method at a break in the sidewalk using images obtained by MY VISION (a Magic eYe of a Visually Impaired for Safety and Independent actiON) and deep learning. MY VISION is a system that analyzes videos obtained from a camera attached to the user's body and provides useful visual information, functioning as a virtual eye for visually impaired people. The proposed method provides a model for recognizing the sidewalk environment and a model for guiding a user to the center of the sidewalk in order to guide the visually impaired people safely. Experiments were conducted to verify the accuracy of each model, and the effectiveness of the proposed method was shown.