Autonomous Guidance System for Visually Impaired in a Library
The goal of this project is to develop an automatic aid to assist and benefit elderly individuals who find the library cataloguing system confusing and individuals with impaired vision. This tool will assist them in an environment such as a library, a book store or even access a bookshelf at home. The user is provided with a wearable real time stereo vision system. Assuming the user is in front of the shelf a system is developed to guide the user towards the book rack. Stereo vision is incorporated to enable depth calculation to facilitate the guidance. The stereo vision system is implemented in such a way that it is independent of the camera intrinsic so that there is no need for a camera calibration step. Hence it can be used in any stereo vision setup. Dynamic programming concepts are used to solve the stereo correspondence problem. Dynamic programming is a state of the art algorithm used in many products for real time stereo vision due to its reliability and speed.
