Companion: Easy Navigation App for Visually Impaired Persons

Life without vision is filled with hardships. We have proposed a system to aid visually impaired persons in their day-to-day navigation by providing them information about their surroundings using audio output (voice feedback) in real-time. The execution of this system is divided into three steps. The first is object detection using the You Only Look Once version 3 (YOLOv3) algorithm. Although multiple objects as detected in each frame, it is not practical to relay each object to the (visually impaired) user. There is a need to find the closest and most relevant object for the user. This is done in the second stage by estimating the depth and finding the closest object with the help of a depth map and comparing the size of bounding boxes in real-time. The output of the first two steps is generated in text format. The last step is to convert the text into audio output using the Text-To-Speech (TTS) API. As this system is intended to be inexpensive and readily available, this system is implemented on Android smartphones and has no additional hardware requirements.