Making Objects Visible for The Blind
Published: Jun 20, 2007The Institute of Informatics of the University of Podlasie in Poland is working on a support system for GPS solutions for the blind. Their focus is automatic object description, instead of voice commands.
All over the world researchers are working on ways to represent geo-data and spatial information to people with a visual impairment or no vision. They focus on the combination of GPS, GPRS, infrared and RFID but only one team is focusing on the description of objects. Stanislaw Jakubowski and his team of the University of Podlasie want to use generic attributes and descriptions to express in general terms what the target object is (buildings, rooms, stairs, etc.).
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“Unlike talking signs, the description is not in voice format but generic terms. This way it can be processed automatically, then sent to the blind user as voice,” according to Jakubowski. “The most important point of the solution we propose is generic object representation (that gives rise to developing an object oriented approach for representing geospatial data) and routing algorithms for determining safe and short paths between objects.”
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Main-authors: Stanislaw Jakubowski, Institute of Informatics, University of Podlasie, Poland. Co-authors: D. Mikulowski, W. Bartyna, D. KocielinskiÂ
