A novel approach of assisting the visually impaired to navigate path and avoiding obstacle-collisions

There is no alternative of visual percepts to brain for accomplishing any easy to complex problem solution. Sustaining in the everyday world environment demands a lot from visual information processing of brain. But a large number of the human being is devoid of the blessings of visual percepts due to biological or accidental causes. This paper presents a critique on vision aided systems and suggests an inexpensive alternative to develop an aided system for visually impaired persons. We propose a real-time solution which utilizes image processing methodology and low cost hardware to support the visually impaired for every day path navigation and obstacle avoidance. A head mounted camera processes the image to identify plausible path and obstacle. The identified path direction and obstacle are converted into pre-defined vocabularies with audio annotation output to the physically challenged people's ears. This method has been tested over varying environmental conditions and is found to be effective for visually impaired navigation.