Skip to main content
EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing
Download PDF

Color Targets: Fiducials to Help Visually Impaired People Find Their Way by Camera Phone

EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing volume 2007, Article number: 096357 (2007) Cite this article

Abstract

A major challenge faced by the blind and visually impaired population is that of wayfinding—the ability of a person to find his or her way to a given destination. We propose a new wayfinding aid based on a camera cell phone, which is held by the user to find and read aloud specially designed machine-readable signs, which we call color targets, in indoor environments (labeling locations such as offices and restrooms). Our main technical innovation is that we have designed the color targets to be detected and located in fractions of a second on the cell phone CPU, even at a distance of several meters. Once the sign has been quickly detected, nearby information in the form of a barcode can be read, an operation that typically requires more computational time. An important contribution of this paper is a principled method for optimizing the design of the color targets and the color target detection algorithm based on training data, instead of relying on heuristic choices as in our previous work. We have implemented the system on Nokia 7610 cell phone, and preliminary experiments with blind subjects demonstrate the feasibility of using the system as a real-time wayfinding aid.

[12345678910111213141516171819202122232425]

References

  1. Coughlan J, Manduchi R, Shen H: Cell phone-based wayfinding for the visually impaired. The 1st International Workshop on Mobile Vision, May 2006, Graz, Austria

    Google Scholar 

  2. Crandall W, Bentzen B, Myers L, Brabyn J: New orientation and accessibility option for persons with visual impairment: transportation applications for remote infrared audible signage. Clinical and Experimental Optometry 2001,84(3):120-131. 10.1111/j.1444-0938.2001.tb04955.x

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Ladd AM, Bekris KE, Rudys AP, Wallach DS, Kavraki LE: On the feasibility of using wireless ethernet for indoor localization. IEEE Transactions on Robotics and Automation 2004,20(3):555-559. 10.1109/TRA.2004.824948

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Uddin MS, Shioyama T: Bipolarity- and projective invariant-based zebra-crossing detection for the visually impaired. Proceedings of the 1st IEEE Workshop on Computer Vision Applications for the Visually Impaired (CVAVI '05), June 2005, San Diego, Calif, USA 22.

    Google Scholar 

  5. Silapachote P, Weinman J, Hanson A, Weiss R, Mattar MA: Automatic sign detection and recognition in natural scenes. Proceedings of the 1st IEEE Workshop on Computer Vision Applications for the Visually Impaired (CVAVI '05), June 2005, San Diego, Calif, USA 27.

    Google Scholar 

  6. Cho Y, Neumann U: Multi-ring color fiducial systems for scalable fiducial tracking augmented reality. Proceedings of the IEEE Virtual Reality Annual International Symposium (VRAIS '98), March 1998, Atlanta, Ga, USA 212.

    Google Scholar 

  7. Claus D, Fitzgibbon AW: Reliable fiducial detection in natural scenes. Proceedings of the 8th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV '04), May 2004, Prague, Czech Republic 4: 469-480.

    MATH  Google Scholar 

  8. Naimark L, Foxlin E: Circular data matrix fiducial system and robust image processing for a wearable vision-inertial self-tracker. Proceedings of the International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR '02), September-October 2002, Darmstadt, Germany 27-36.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  9. Scharstein D, Briggs AJ: Real-time recognition of self-similar landmarks. Image and Vision Computing 2001,19(11):763-772. 10.1016/S0262-8856(00)00105-0

    Article  Google Scholar 

  10. State A, Hirota G, Chen D, Garrett W, Livingston M: Superior augmented reality registration by integrating landmark tracking and magnetic tracking. Proceedings of the 23rd Annual Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques (SIGGRAPH '96), August 1996, New Orleans, La, USA 429-438.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  11. Zandifar A, Duraiswami PR, Chahine A, Davis LS: A video based interface to textual information for the visually impaired. Proceedings of the 4th IEEE International Conference on Multimodal Interfaces (ICMI '02), October 2002, Pittsburgh, Pa, USA 325-330.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  12. Liang J, Doermann D, Li H: Camera-based analysis of text and documents: a survey. International Journal on Document Analysis and Recognition 2005,7(2-3):84-104. 10.1007/s10032-004-0138-z

    Article  Google Scholar 

  13. Chen X, Yuille AL: Detecting and reading text in natural scenes. Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR '04), June-July 2004, Washington, DC, USA 2: 366-373.

    Google Scholar 

  14. Gao J, Yang J: An adaptive algorithm for text detection from natural scenes. Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR '01), December 2001, Kauai, Hawaii, USA 2: 84-89.

    Google Scholar 

  15. Jain AK, Yu B: Automatic text location in images and video frames. Pattern Recognition 1998,31(12):2055-2076. 10.1016/S0031-3203(98)00067-3

    Article  Google Scholar 

  16. Li H, Doermann D, Kia O: Automatic text detection and tracking in digital video. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 2000,9(1):147-156. 10.1109/83.817607

    Article  Google Scholar 

  17. Viola P, Jones M: Rapid object detection using a boosted cascade of simple features. Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR '01), December 2001, Kauai, Hawaii, USA 1: 511-518.

    Google Scholar 

  18. Funt BV, Finlayson GD: Color constant color indexing. IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence 1995,17(5):522-529. 10.1109/34.391390

    Article  Google Scholar 

  19. Manduchi R, Tomasi C: Distinctiveness maps for image matching. Proceedings of the 10th International Conference on Image Analysis and Processing, September 1999, Venice, Italy 26-31.

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  20. Baumberg A: Reliable feature matching across widely separated views. Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR '00), June 2000, Hilton Head Island, SC, USA 1: 774-781.

    Google Scholar 

  21. Lowe DG: Distinctive image features from scale-invariant keypoints. International Journal of Computer Vision 2004,60(2):91-110.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  22. Schmid C, Mohr R, Bauckhage C: Evaluation of interest point detectors. International Journal of Computer Vision 2000,37(2):151-172. 10.1023/A:1008199403446

    Article  MATH  Google Scholar 

  23. Shi J, Tomasi C: Good features to track. Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR '94), June 1994, Seattle, Wash, USA 593-600.

    Google Scholar 

  24. Sharma G, Trussell HJ: Digital color imaging. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 1997,6(7):901-932. 10.1109/83.597268

    Article  Google Scholar 

  25. Coughlan J, Manduchi R: Functional assessment of a camera phone-based wayfinding system operated by blind users. Conference of IEEE Computer Society and the Biological and Artificial Intelligence Society (IEEE-BAIS), Research on Assistive Technologies Symposium (RAT '07), April 2007, Dayton, Ohio, USA

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center, Smith-Kettlewell Eye Research Institute, San Francisco, CA, 94115, USA

    James Coughlan

  2. University of California, Santa Cruz, CA, 95064, USA

    Roberto Manduchi

Authors
  1. James Coughlan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

  2. Roberto Manduchi
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to James Coughlan.

Rights and permissions

Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Reprints and Permissions

About this article

Cite this article

Coughlan, J., Manduchi, R. Color Targets: Fiducials to Help Visually Impaired People Find Their Way by Camera Phone. J Image Video Proc 2007, 096357 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/96357

Download citation

  • Received:

  • Revised:

  • Accepted:

  • Published:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/96357

Keywords