An outdoor cognition system integrated on a regular smartphone device

In this paper we introduce an assistive device dedicated to visual impaired / blind people completely integrated on a regular smartphone. The framework is designed to detect and localize static and dynamic obstacle during user navigation. We start by selecting a reduced and relevant set of FAST interest points based on a regular grid and Harris-Laplacian operator. Then, we construct a global image representation using VLAD (Vector of Locally Aggregated Descriptor) that is further whitened using PCA (Principal Component Analysis). At the end the image patch is fed to a SVM (Support Vector Machine) system that uses a statistical procedure to distinguish between different types of obstacles.