VisualPal: A mobile app for object recognition for the visually impaired

As far as out-door activities are concerned the blind face difficulties in safe and independent mobility depriving them of normal professional and social life. Also there are issues of communication and access to information. There are software applications for computers and touch screen devices equipped with speech synthesizers. This project is for the visually impaired people and is based on the android platform. The project detects the direction of maximum brightness and the major colors. The major module of the project scans and detects the object in the image captured by the camera of an in built camera of a smartphone for the visually impaired. It is a dedicated image recognition application running on an Android system smartphone. It overcomes the limitation of previously existing technologies that require the visually impaired to possess special hardware or devices. Image recognition results are communicated to the blind users by means of pre-recorded verbal messages. By the use of hybrid algorithm the computation time is reduced and the correct object is detected very fast. The visually impaired are thus largely benefitted by this project. Use of android platform overcomes the shortcomings of the already existing devices. The color information is also used apart from the grayscale information. The object from any orientation can be recognized correctly.