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AN ELECTRONIC EYE FOR VISUALLY IMPAIRED

(NANOTECHNOLOGY)

PRESENTED BY
G.PANNERSELVAM
P.PRASAD
111 YR ECE

VELAMMAL ENGINEERING COLLEGE

e- Mail address:

pannerwelcome@yahoo.com
shivpalprasad@yahoo.co.in
ABSTRACT

This paper proposes a method for detecting frontal pedestrian crossings from
image data obtained with a single camera as a travel aid for the visually challenged. This
would be mounted on a pair of glasses, will be capable of detecting the existence and
location of a pedestrian crossing, to measure the width of the road, and to detect the color
of the traffic lights. The process of detecting a crossing is a pre-process followed by the
process for detecting the state of the traffic lights. It is important for the visually
challenged to know whether or not a frontal area is a crossing. The existence of a
crossing is detected in two steps. In the first step, edge detection and pattern detection are
employed to identify the crossing. In the second step, the existence of a crossing is
detected by checking the periodicity of white lines on the road using projective
invariants. Then the traffic light detector is used to check the pedestrian light and the time
display. The calculated time is then compared with the average time needed for a blind
person to cross. The observations are relayed through voice signals using the voice vision
technology. Thus, this effective technology aids mobility for the visually impaired
throughout the globe.

INDEX
Introduction
An overview of our Electronic Eye
Functioning of the system
 Image Analyzer
 Calculation of width of road and time required to cross it
 Traffic light detector
 Timing unit
 Voice speech system
Functional block
Conclusion
INTRODUCTION a curb or crosswalk and frequently fail in
areas that have many tall buildings and
Blindness is the high traffic. None of these devices are
most feared of all human ailments. able to specifically identify a crosswalk,
CROSSING busy roads can be a nor do they have the potential for
challenge for people with good vision. figuring out the state of the traffic
For blind people, it is a perilous activity. signals.
Our electronic eye aims at helping
An effective
millions of blind and visually impaired
navigation system would improve the
people lead more independent lives.
mobility of millions of blind people all
The electronic eye over the world. Our new “eye” will
can be adapted to help the blind or allow blind people to cross busy roads
visually impaired get around without a in total safety for the first time. Our
walking stick or seeing-eye dog. Canes “electronic eye”, which would be
and other travel aids with sonar or lasers mounted on a pair of glasses, will be
can alert the user to approaching objects. capable of detecting the existence and
Global Positioning Systems can tell location of a pedestrian crossing, and at
what streets, restaurants, parks and other the same time measure the width of the
landmarks the user is passing. Devices road to the nearest step and detect the
like these are very good at giving color of the traffic lights.
locations and directions. But the
limitations of G.P.S. technology mean
that they cannot pin down the location of
AN OVERVIEW OF OUR ELECTRONIC EYE

A camera to
capture the image
of crossroads and
traffic signals

A voice speech
generator - used to
instruct the user

lights, this single camera can now give


We have developed a system that is able the blind all the information they need to
to detect the existence of a pedestrian cross a road in safety. The camera would
crossing in front of a blind person using be mounted at eye level, and be
a single camera. By measuring the connected to a tiny computer. It will
width of the road and the color of traffic relay information using a voice speech
system and give vocal commands and
information through a small speaker
placed near the ear.
FUNCTIONING OF THE SYSTEM
CAMERA CROSS
IMAGE ROAD 1
ANALYSER DETECTOR

1
TRAFFIC VOICE TIMING
2
LIGHT SPEECH3
DETECTOR GENERATOR UNIT

1 2 3

TO USERS
EAR

1 – Tells the user whether any cross road invariant” which takes the distance
is present
between the white lines and a set of
2 - Tells the user whether the traffic
signal is favorable or not
linear points on the edges of the
3 – Tells the user the time taken to cross
white lines. This gives an accurate way
the road.
of detecting whether crossing is present
The style of crosswalks
in a given image or not.
commonly used in India are known as
The length of a pedestrian
zebra crossings and they feature a series
crossing is measured by projective
of thick white bands that run in the same
geometry. The camera makes an image
direction as the vehicle traffic.
of the white lines painted on the road,
To detect the presence of a zebra
and then the actual distances are
crossing we use the “projective
determined using the properties of for symmetrical shapes and compares
geometric shapes as seen in the image. them to a
The traffic light detector checks images
list of road signs. If the pedestrian light High-level scene interpretation
is ON, the voice speech system instructs applied to the processed images will
the user to cross the road. produce a symbolic description of the
Timer unit calculates the average scene. The symbolic description is then
time required by the visually challenged converted into verbal instructions
person to cross the road and ‘tells’ it to appropriate to the needs of the user by
the user via the voice speech system. using voice speech software
.

IMAGE ANALYSER CROSSROAD PATTERN


DETECTION
The image analyzer contains the
The zebra crossing has alternate
bitmap image, which has to be processed
white bands running across the width of
to detect the presence of a zebra
the road. This pattern has to be
crossing. Given an X-bit per pixel
recognized to confirm the presence of a
image, slicing the image at different
crossing. To detect basic shapes within
planes (bit-planes) plays an important
the image, we make use of the Hough
role in image processing.
transform. At its simplest the Hough
transform can be used to detect straight
EDGE DETECTION
lines from edges detected in an earlier
One way to detect edges or
processing step.
variations within a region of an image is
If the pixels detected fall on a straight
by using the gradient operator. There are
line then they can be expressed by the
several well-known gradient filters. In
equation:
this experiment we use the Sobel
Y=mx+c
gradients, which are obtained by
The basis of the Hough transform is to
convolving the image with two kernels,
translate the points in (x, y) space into
one for each direction.
(m,c) space using the equation:
c=(-x)m+y
Thus each point in (x,y) space (i.e. the intersect a value can be found for the
image) represents a line in (m,c) space. gradient (m) and intercept (c) of the line
Where three or more of these lines that connects the (x,y) space points
.

CALCULATION OF THE WIDTH OF THE ROAD AND


TIME REQUIRED TO CROSS IT

Calculation of the width of the road is based on the concept of projection invariants. This
requires us to define the term Cross Ratio. L1

P4 L2
P3
P2
L3
P1

L4
The cross ratio can defined for the four collinear points as,
τ (P1, P2, P3, P4) = (P1P3/P2P3)/ (P1P4/P2P4)
Where P1P2 is the distance P1 to P2. The cross ratio of the four lines is given by,
τ (L1, L2, L3, L4) = (sinθ /sinθ
13 )/ (sinθ
23 /sinθ
14 )
24

Where θ ij is the angle between Li and Lj. L1

L2
P1
L3
P2
P3 L4
P4
In the above figure, lines are constructed
from the collinear points and in the
Here (λ ,µ ) are the coordinates of A in
adjacent figure a line is formed by
the 2D linear subspace spanned by the
joining the points in the lines L1, L2, L3,
coordinate vectors M and N. N is
L4.
represented by (0, 1) and serves as the
A useful fact is that the cross-
``origin'' and M is represented by (1, 0)
ratio of the original four points is equal
and serves as the ``point at infinity''.
to the cross-ratio of the constructed
For an arbitrary point (λ ,µ ) ≠ (1,0)
lines.
we can rescale (λ ,µ ) to µ =1 and
To detect the presence of a zebra
represent A by its ``affine coordinates'',
crossing we use the “projective
invariant” which takes the distance (λ , 1) or just λ for short. Since we

between the white lines and a set of have mapped M to infinity, this is just

linear points on the edges of the white linear distance along the line from N.

lines. The system effectively draws a The time required to cross the road is

virtual line out into the road. If a calculated based on an assumption that

crosswalk is present, the edges of the the user covers a distance of one foot in

painted white lines will form a a minute on an average. So, the time

predictable series of points along the required to cover the calculated distance

virtual line. is calculated based on a simple logic.

Let M and N be two distinct points of Generally, the time taken, T, to cross the

the projective space. Here we take points road can be found out by

M and N as the points on the edges of


the line formed on the image. The
projective line between M and N consists
of all points A of the form T = Calculated width of the road
Distance covered by the user in one second
TRAFFIC LIGHT properties such as color, texture, shape
and keywords.
DETECTOR
Every image is processed to
recover the boundary contour, which is
The function of the traffic light
then represented by three global shape
detector is to recognize if the pedestrian
parameters and the maxima of the
light is on for the user to cross the road.
curvature zero-crossing contours in its
If the user happens to reach the road
Curvature Scale Space image.
when the pedestrian light is already on,
the time indicated by the timer display in
CURVATURE SCALE SPACE
the traffic light must be detected and COMPUTATION AND MATCHING
compared with the time required by the
The CSS image is a multi-scale
user to cross the road. If the user can
organization of the inflection points (or
cross the road safely, the voice speech
curvature zero-crossing points) of the
system will instruct him to cross the
contour as it evolves. Intuitively,
road. This process can be effectively
curvature is a local measure of how fast
done by having an image database in the
a planar contour is turning. Contour
system and comparing the obtained
evolution is achieved by first
image of camera to detect if pedestrian
parametrizing using arc length. This
light is on and to detect the time left to
involves sampling the contour at equal
cross the road.
intervals and recording the 2-D
We have a large number of
coordinates of each sampled point. The
images and wish to select some of them,
result is a set of 2 coordinate functions
which are similar to a certain image (for
(of arc length), which are then
example, the image of the pedestrian
convolved, with a Gaussian filter of
light). So we need a content-based
increasing width or standard deviation.
image database system, which accepts
Next step is to compute curvature on
an image as its input and retrieves all
each smoothed contour.
images like that by using some image
As a result, curvature zero- overlap with the maxima of the other
crossing points can be recovered and CSS image. The matching cost is then
mapped to the CSS image in which the defined as the sum of pair wise distances
horizontal axis represents the arc length (in CSS) between corresponding pairs of
parameter on the original contour, and maxima.
the vertical axis represents the standard So, if an image of a pedestrian
deviation of the Gaussian filter. light in the image database finds a match
The features recovered from a with an image in the camera, the
CSS image for matching are the maxima pedestrian can cross the road. The time
of its zero-crossing contours. The in seconds required to cross the road is
matching of two CSS images consists of also detected based on the image of
finding the optimal horizontal shift of numbers in the database.
the maxima in one of the CSS images
that would yield the best possible

OBTAINED IMAGE IMAGE DATABASE

PEDESTRIAN LIGHT
DETECTION

TIMER UNIT

TIMING UNIT The timing unit compares the


calculated value T, the time required by
the user to cross the road with the time
left to cross the road T1, as identified
from the image (traffic signal time). If cross the road. Else it asks to wait till it
T < T1, the system instructs the user to is safe to cross the road.

VOICE SPEECH SYSTEM converted into verbal instructions


appropriate to the needs of the user.
AUDITORY IMAGE
REPRESENTATION
VOICE VISION
`The images captured by the The VOICE VISION technology
camera are swept from left to right at for the totally blind offers the experience
little less than one image per second. of live camera views through
The pixels in each column generate a sophisticated image-to-sound renderings.
particular sound pattern, consisting of a If we have a 64 * 64, 16 gray tone
combination of frequencies based on that image, the 64-channel sound synthesis
specific set of Pixels. The result is an maps the image into an exponentially
auditory signature effectively an inverse distributed frequency interval for a one
spectrogram that characterizes the second visual sound. The VOICE
particular image. mapping: vertical positions of points in a
High-level scene interpretation visual sound are represented by pitch,
applied to the processed images will while horizontal positions are
produce a symbolic description of the represented by time-after-click.
scene. The symbolic description is then Brightness is represented by loudness. In
this manner, pixels become... voicels!
FUNCTIONAL BLOCK START

CAPTURE IMAGE
ANALYSER
THE IMAGE

ANALYSE
THE
IMAGE

IS
YES THERE ANY NO
CROSS ROADS

INFORM THE CROSS


USER THAT A ROAD
CROSSROAD IS DETECTOR
DETECTED
@

CALCULATE
THE WIDTH
OF THE ROAD

DETECT THE TRAFFIC


LIGHT

IS THE TRAFFIC
LIGHT NO INFORM THE LIGHT
YES FAVOURABLE? USER TO WAIT DETECTOR

CALCULATE
THE TIME
TAKEN TO IDENTIFY THE TIME
CROSS THE LEFT IN THE
ROAD (A)
TRAFFIC SIGNAL (B)

YES IF NO
A<B
TIMER
INFORM THE INFORM THE UNIT
USER TO CROSS USER TO
THE ROAD WAIT

STOP
CONCLUSION Blind pedestrians in the greatest
danger are those who must cross wide,
The development of
busy roads. This system along with the
mobility aids for the visually
available low technology aids can
impaired is a challenging task
relieve the visually challenged of being
that has many potential
dependent on others and lead normal
solutions. A sophisticated mechanism
lives. This effective navigation system
designed to enhance the mobility of the
would improve the mobility of millions
blind is intended to help people who
of blind people all over the world.
cannot recover their eyesight by normal
medical procedures.

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