Enhanced obstacle detection using bilateral vision-aided transformer neural network for visually impaired persons

Abstract Obstacle detection remains vital in autonomous navigation and assistive technologies, especially for visually impaired individuals. This work introduces an enhanced obstacle detection framework based on a Bilateral Vision Transformer and Convolution Kernel Neural Network (BViT-CKNN). The system incorporates stereo vision data and applies a bilateral filter to reduce noise while preserving edge details. A Vision Transformer (ViT) model is then used for global feature extraction, and a Convolution Kernel Neural Network (CKNN) captures fine-grained local features. Evaluated using the COCO dataset, the proposed BViT-CKNN achieves superior performance in precision (0.93), recall (0.91), F1-score (0.92), and Mean Absolute Error (MAE) reduction (3.16%) compared to existing methods.