Problem

In 2002 there were more than 37 million blind persons worldwide[10]. This impairment can cause large amounts of difficulty in the individual’s daily life making some basic tasks very awkward and in some cases almost impossible. To compensate for this disability often a cane or a trained dog are used to help guide the individuals through crowded areas. Though these tools can assist in basic hazard detection they do not provide directional feedback. Directional information would be needed if the tool were to guide the person to generic interest points in a building. Having such a tool would give the visually impaired much more freedom and independence.

Purpose

The purpose of this project was to design a system using computer algorithms to estimate a person’s trajectory as they walked through a room in a building. From this information navigational instruction could be generated.

Hypothesis

Using only data recorded from an inexpensive video camera, it would be possible to extract enough information about objects in a room through analysing the angles of the objects in the camera’s field of view to correlate the user’s position on the map and track his trajectory. In addition it would be possible to quantitatively analyse any limitations.