Towards a Sign-Based Indoor Navigation System for People with Visual Impairments

Abstract: 

Navigation is a challenging task for many travelers with visual impairments. While

a variety of GPS-enabled tools can provide wayfinding assistance in outdoor settings, GPS

provides no useful localization information indoors. A variety of indoor navigation tools are

being developed, but most of them require potentially costly physical infrastructure to be

installed and maintained, or else the creation of detailed visual models of the environment.

We'll report the development of a new smartphone-based navigation aid, which combines

inertial sensing, computer vision, and floor plan information to estimate the user’s location

with no additional physical infrastructure and requiring only the locations of signs relative to

the floor plan. A formative study was conducted with three blind volunteer participants

demonstrating the feasibility of the approach and highlighting the areas needing improvement.

This talk will be about this initial result and details on how I'm working to improve them.