Wearable Computer for the Visually Impaired

2017 ELE Engineering Design Project (NMK06)


Faculty Lab Coordinator

Naimul Mefraz Khan

Topic Category

Intelligent Instrumentation

Preamble

Advances in computer vision and machine learning has made detecting objects, faces, texts from images easier. With the power of services like Google cloud vision, it is possible to provide a "virtual eye" to a visually impaired person, where through continuous analysis of video stream from a camera, a wearable computer can provide spoken feedback on anything that is in front of it. By providing some rudimentary user control over the analysis process, this type of wearable computer can become an indispensable companion for the visually impaired.

Objective

The objective of this project is to build a wearable computer that can provide automated cloud-based and user-specified analysis of images through a video stream obtained from a camera, and provide spoken feedback on the analysis results through a speaker.

Partial Specifications

1. The computer should have a camera, a speaker, and a set of push buttons.
2. Images obtained through the camera should be streamed to a server for cloud-based analysis.
3. The user can specify what to analyze from the image through push buttons. Example: recognize face, recognize object, extract text.
4. The analysis results are provided as a spoken feedback through a speaker.
5. The computer, camera, speaker, and push buttons should be packaged into a wearable rig.

Suggested Approach

1. Raspberry Pi with camera, speaker and push buttons.
2. Connect to some vision API (e.g. Google cloud vision).
3. Stream images to cloud.
4. Play analysis results back through speaker.
5. Push buttons can be used to select type of analysis.

Group Responsibilities

1. Survey hardware and software (cloud API) to figure out the best approach. 2. System design. 3. Implementation. 4. Testing under varying conditions (low lighting, fast motion, difficult angles, etc.)

Student A Responsibilities

Hardware + wearable rig + programming for push buttons

Student B Responsibilities

Hardware + programming for image streaming

Student C Responsibilities

Programming for cloud-based API

Course Co-requisites

 


NMK06: Wearable Computer for the Visually Impaired | Naimul Mefraz Khan | Not yet submitted at No time