A Smart Real-Time Standalone Route Recognition System for Visually Impaired Persons

Abstract

Visual Impairment is a common disability that results in poor or no eyesight, whose victims suffer inconveniences in performing their daily tasks. Visually impaired persons require some aids to interact with their environment safely. Existing navigation systems like electronic travel aids (ETAs) are mostly cloud-based and rely heavily on the internet and google map. This implies that systems deployment in locations with poor internet facilities and poorly structured environments is not feasible. This paper proposed a smart real-time standalone route recognition system for visually impaired persons. The proposed system makes use of a pedestrian route network, an interconnection of paths and their associated route tables, for providing directions of known locations in real-time for the user. Federal University of Technology (FUT), Minna, Gidan Kwanu campus was used as the case study. The result obtained from testing of the device search strategy on the field showed that the complexity of the algorithm used in searching for paths in the pedestrian network is O(𝑁2), at worst-case scenario, where N is the number of paths available in the network. The accuracy of path recognition is 100%. This implies that the developed system is reliable and can be used in recognizing and navigating routes by the visual impaired in real-time.