RT info:eu-repo/semantics/article
T1 Unifying terrain awareness for the visually impaired through real-time semantic segmentation
A1 Yang, Kailun
A1 Wang, Kaiwei
A1 Bergasa Pascual, Luis Miguel
A1 Romera Carmena, Eduardo
A1 Hu, Weijian
A1 Sun, Dongming
A1 Sun, Junwei
A1 Cheng, Ruiqi
A1 Chen, TIanxue
A1 López Guillén, María Elena
K1 Navigation assistance
K1 Semantic segmentation
K1 Traversability awareness
K1 Obstacle avoidance
K1 RGB-D sensor
K1 Visually-impaired people
K1 Electrónica
K1 Electronics
AB Navigational assistance aims to help visually-impaired people to ambulate the environment safely and independently. This topic becomes challenging as it requires detecting a wide variety of scenes to provide higher level assistive awareness. Vision-based technologies with monocular detectors or depth sensors have sprung up within several years of research. These separate approaches have achieved remarkable results with relatively low processing time and have improved the mobility of impaired people to a large extent. However, running all detectors jointly increases the latency and burdens the computational resources. In this paper, we put forward seizing pixel-wise semantic segmentation to cover navigation-related perception needs in a unified way. This is critical not only for the terrain awareness regarding traversable areas, sidewalks, stairs and water hazards, but also for the avoidance of short-range obstacles, fast-approaching pedestrians and vehicles. The core of our unification proposal is a deep architecture, aimed at attaining efficient semantic understanding. We have integrated the approach in a wearable navigation system by incorporating robust depth segmentation. A comprehensive set of experiments prove the qualified accuracy over state-of-the-art methods while maintaining real-time speed. We also present a closed-loop field test involving real visually-impaired users, demonstrating the effectivity and versatility of the assistive framework.
PB MDPI
SN 1424-8220
YR 2018
FD 2018-05-10
LK http://hdl.handle.net/10017/43213
UL http://hdl.handle.net/10017/43213
LA eng
NO Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad
DS MINDS@UW
RD 19-abr-2024