Emergency exit sign detection system for visually impaired people

Emergency exit signs are used for safety purpose in buildings, malls, shops, etc and various other places. They provide escape routes or ways using which people can escape during emergency situations. Escaping during such situations using the emergency exit signs and emergency doors are easier for sighted people, but visually impaired should rely upon someone else. Hence, in this paper we propose an approach to recognize the emergency exit sign using a mobile phone. This involves developing software that recognizes the exit sign captured by the mobile camera and intimidate the direction to escape as an audio output. This software is packaged as an android application on a mobile phone making it easily accessible and less expensive for the visually impaired people. In our approach, we have used edge detection and region detection techniques to identify possible object candidates in the complex image captured. We, then identify exit sign board by checking the presence of the word using `EXIT' using region filtering, which filters out non-text and non-arrow regions and optical character recognition. By analyzing the connected components present in the exit sign board region, we separate the text and arrow region. Using template matching, we find the direction of the arrow, which is then rendered as an audio output.