TY  - EJOU
AU  - Meenakshi, R. 
AU  - Ponnusamy, R. 
AU  - Alghamdi, Saleh 
AU  - Khalaf, Osama Ibrahim 
AU  - Alotaibi, Youseef 

TI  - Development of Mobile App to Support the Mobility of Visually Impaired People
T2  - Computers, Materials \& Continua

PY  - 2022
VL  - 73
IS  - 2
SN  - 1546-2226

AB  - In 2017, it was estimated that the number of persons of all ages visually affected would be two hundred and eighty-five million, of which thirty-nine million are blind. There are several innovative technical solutions available to facilitate the movement of these people. The next big challenge for technical people is to give cost-effective solutions. One of the challenges for people with visual impairments is navigating safely, recognizing obstacles, and moving freely between locations in unfamiliar environments. A new mobile application solution is developed, and the application can be installed in android mobile. The application will visualize the environment with portable cameras and persons with visual impairment directly to the environment. The designed system mainly uses the YOLO3 program to identify and locate the distance between the objects and the camera. Furthermore, it determines the direction of the object. Finally, the system will give the voice command to teach/inform the visually impaired people to navigate the environment. It is a novel work at the global level. The proposed approach is cost-effective and affordable to all strata of society.
KW  - Visual Impairment; cost-effective; YOLO (“You Only Look Once”); computer vision; object recognition; CNN (Convolution Neural Networks); virtual mapping; navigate; voice command

DO  - 10.32604/cmc.2022.028540