Sight-to-Sound Human-Machine Interface for Guiding and Navigating Visually Impaired People

Abstract

Visually impaired people often find it hard to navigate efficiently in complex environments. Moreover, helping them to navigate intuitively is not a trivial task. In sighted people, cognitive maps derived from visual cues play a pivotal role in navigation. In this paper, we present a sight-to-sound human-machine interface (STS-HMI), a novel machine vision guidance system that enables visually impaired people to navigate with instantaneous and intuitive responses. The proposed STS-HMI system extracts visual context from scenes and converts them into binaural acoustic cues for users to establish cognitive maps. A series of experiments were conducted to evaluate the performance of the STS-HMI system in a complex environment with difficult navigation paths. The experimental results confirm that the STS-HMI system improves visually impaired people's mobility with minimal effort.

Keywords

• Acoustic cues
• human-machine interface
• navigation
• visually impaired