CaneScanner: Obstacle detection for people with visual disabilities

RADARs, LIDARs and, ultrasonic sensors have been used in products and research prototypes to offer navigation facilities to People with Visual Disabilities (PVD). However, those are not widely adopted due to their cost, high power consumption, and reliance on their users for scanning the environment. Sensing solutions for PVD must be portable, economical and robust. We propose CaneScanner, a lightweight inexpensive solution designed to find the depth-map of an indoor environment using a white-cane equipped with a single camera and inertial sensors. CaneScanner is the first work which addresses the low power long-range depth sensing needs of PVD.