A Support System for a Visually Impaired Person Finding Bus Route Numbers Employing MY VISION

A bus is not a very convenient means for a visually impaired person because of the difficulty in identifying its route number, although it is an economical tool for travel.This paper proposes a method of detecting and identifying a bus route number using the MYVISION system which employs an ego camera worn by a visually impaired person.The method finds a frontal area of a bus approaching a bus stop using the video which the camera provides by using optical flow and random forest employing Haar-like features.It then extracts the upper destination panel area followed by the detection of a route number at the right-hand side of the panel.Finally, the detected route number is identified by template matching.In the experiment, various kinds of videos containing the buses of a bus company were captured at different places and different weather conditions, and the effectiveness of the proposed method was shown.The method is now planned to be applied to the busses of various bus companies.