Blind Navigation Assistance for Visually Impaired based on Local Depth Hypothesis from a Single Image

Assisting the visually impaired along their navigation path is a challenging task which drew the attention of several researchers. A lot of techniques based on RFID, GPS and computer vision modules are available for blind navigation assistance. In this paper, we proposed a depth estimation technique from a single image based on local depth hypothesis devoid of any user intervention and its application to assist the visually impaired people. The ambient space ahead of the user is captured by a camera and the captured image is resized for computational efficiency. The obstacles in the foreground of the image are segregated using edge detection followed by morphological operations. Then depth is estimated for each obstacle based on local depth hypothesis. The estimated depth map is then compared with the reference depth map of the corresponding depth hypothesis and the deviation of the estimated depth map from the reference depth map is used to retrieve the spatial information about the obstacles ahead of the user.