Supporting Safe Walk of a Visually Impaired Person at a Station Platform Based on MY VISION

When individuals with visual impairment go out, public transportation such as trains and buses is commonly used.However, many of them experience accidents, such as falling from train platforms or tripping due to unexpected contact with other passengers.To solve this problem, we propose a method using the MY VISION system which detects obstacles that may pose risks to individuals with visual impairment.The proposed method detects obstacles such as passengers' pillars and platform edges at train stations.We employ an RGB-D camera for capturing frontal views of a user, use depth images to detect the edge of obstacles and level differences, and give warning to the visually impaired user based on the distance between him/her and the detected obstacle.Experimental results show satisfactory performance of the method.