Image processing issues in a social assistive system for the blind

We systematically analyse the design of the low-level vision components of a real-time system able to help a blind person in his/her social interactions. We focus on the acquisition and processing of the video sequences that are acquired by a wearable sensor (a smartphone camera or a Webcam) for the detection of faces in the scene. We review some classical and some very recent techniques that seem appropriate to the requirements of our goal.