The number of blind and visually impaired people in Germany is increasing. Finding an object such as a door handle is sometimes a great challenge for these people. By developing a prototype, the present work investigates the hypothesis that the navigation process to a searched object in the immediate surroundings can be partially automated with the help of a smartphone app and thus made easier for the visually impaired person.
The object recognition of the prototype is based on the neural network of the Google Cloud Vision API, and the navigation on an idea of the three-dimensional environment of the visually impaired person acquired through the augmented reality framework ARCore from Google.
The evaluation shows that the recognition of, for example, a door handle and the navigation to this door handle are possible if sufficient criteria such as texture-rich surfaces and good lighting conditions are given.
This work presents a novel approach to assist visually impaired individuals by integrating advanced object recognition and navigation technologies into a user-friendly smartphone application.
