International Journal of Recent Advances in Engineering & Technology (IJRAET)
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Survey of Dependency between Visually Impaired Persons and Normal Persons
1P. A. Ahire, 2S. M. Galande
Information Technology VIIT, Pune Maharastra, Pune University, India Email: [email protected], [email protected]
Abstract - One of the major shortcomings of society is the social barrier that is created between visually impaired persons and persons who are blessed with all their human faculties in order. Vision, which is the basis of human progress, often tends to be a hurdle for those unfortunate people who are unable to plot the route while they are walking themselves. Such peoples are usually dependent on individuals who are blessed with the ability to move around to perform their day to day tasks. This paper illustrates the lack of proper means to overcome this dependency barrier, which has led to social inequality resulting in day to day problems for visually impaired persons as they are dependent upon normal people. The main problem with this dependency is that a normal people is not suppose to free for guiding visually impaired person every time, so there is need of proper means to overcome this dependency barrier.
In this survey, we present research and development trends in this area. We provide a comparison of existing applications and research efforts to eliminate the dependency between visually impaired person and normal person. This survey also reports on statistics of visually impaired persons in India and need of an effective, efficient and portable solution that can overcome the dependency barrier for visually impaired persons.
Keywords - Vision, Visually impaired person, Dependency Barrier, Disabled Persons.
I. INTRODUCTION
Living in the privileged galaxy of intellects and witnessing a technical revolution in day to day life it is imperative to not overlook the responsibility to utilize technology in order to contribute to the progress and development of society at large. Vision is the fundamental basis for any individual to live a normal life, yet it is the primary source of information for the average person. Sight is one of the senses in the five major senses: sight, hearing, touch, taste and smell. In interaction with your day to day task you receive information primarily by sight.
Many people have some type of visual problem at some point in their lives. Some can no longer see objects far away. Others have problems reading small print. This type of peoples mainly considered as Visual Impairment [11]. Visual Impairment is a term experts use to describe
any kind of vision loss, whether it‟s someone who cannot see at all or someone who has partial loss. Some people are completely blind, but many others have what‟s called legal blindness. They haven‟t lost their sight completely but have lost enough vision that they‟d have to stand 20 feet from an object to see it as well as someone with perfect vision could from 200 feet away [5].
As of 2012 there were 285 million visually impaired people in the world, of which 246 million where blind [6].
According to the mospi [9] the comparative figures on persons with Disabilities based on NSSO 2002 survey (58th round) 28.26 lakh people suffer from visual disorders. Census [8] 2001 has revealed that over 21 million people in India suffer from one or the other kind of disability. This is equivalent to 2.1% of the population.
Among the total disabled in the country, 12.6 million are males and 9.3 million are females. Disability in seeing accounts for 48.5%. According to JICA [10] statistics profile on disability 10.32% people suffer from visual disorders in India.
Disability statistics provides evidence about problem itself, such as: gender differences, prevalence of disability in society. Disability statistics also provides us a wealth of information about different kinds of disabilities, number of people affected by different kinds of disorders, and barriers they face in their life. The major barrier a disabled person faces in his life is inability to see.
A. Social Effects
People who are suffering from vision disorder can have negative social effects. Visually impaired persons can become targets of bullying among normal people due to their disorders. The bullying can result in decrease of self-esteem in visually impaired persons, especially among young children.
B. Motivation
We were motivated to perform this survey in order to enumerate and compare state-of-the-art research that endeavors to aid visually impaired persons. This study paper highlights the problems faced by visually impaired
people and lack of effective, efficient, portable and usable technological support to help them. This survey can become the starting point for anyone trying to understand, evaluate and develop techniques to eliminate the dependency between visually impaired and normal people, especially in overcoming the challenges faced in Indian society by providing Indian language support.
II. LITERATURE SURVEY
This section contains the description about the survey done to identify the problems faced by the vision impaired persons and various proposed and available solutions are discussed along with their drawbacks.
A. Physical Site Visits
During the first phase of research, a survey was conducted at „Poona School And Home For Blind‟
(School for Vision Impaired) located at 14-17, Dr.S.R.Machave Rd, Koregaon Park, Pune. There we interacted with the Principal and teachers of the school discussing with them their teaching methodologies, understanding the mindset and special requirements of the disabled students and the problems faced by them in walking themselves. We were also granted an opportunity to sit in the classrooms and observe the teaching sessions in progress. We attended the classes starting from Kindergarten and going right up to Class VII. The changes in the students were noted as well as the major problems that were faced by the teachers in teaching the students with special needs came across clearly to us.
The following data was collected from the school regarding how many students own smart phones, laptops and how many can afford to buy the same.
Table 1: Statistical Data from Poona School and Home for Blind School
Class Age Lap- top
Smart- phone
Can afford to
Buy
Partially Blind 1-4 9-12 7.3% 9.75% 4.8% 25%
5-7 12-16 21% 24.24% 33.33% 15.15%
The fundamental issue that came to light was the fact that we found that if we tell them that there is an obstacle, then they are able to take decision by their own to move around. Means they are able to take decisions and can move around by themselves but they are dependent upon normal people to guide them.
We observe that if they walk alone, they face different problems to plot the route as there are different obstacles and objects in front of them which they are not able to recognize. In short there is high probability that they will bumped into the obstacles. We did experience a barrier that we wished to overcome.
Moreover, we observed that though the students were visually impaired, most of them were quite sharp and some were even intelligent and passionate towards learning. In this survey we met with one boy who asked
us “give me a cell phone I will call one of you”. We gave him a cell phone which has keypad to type numbers, we also told him one of us cell number and we observe he typed correctly each and every number and he called successfully. After some time we asked the same boy to tell that number which we said and we shocked the number which is told by him was absolutely correct. Means the memory of this people is very sharp as compare to normal people.
Thus, we felt that if this dependency could be eliminated, it would lead to tremendous opportunity for visually impaired people to lead a close to normal life, overcoming the prevalent social inequality thereby leading to their individual as well as societal progress.
B. Study of Existing Applications in Google and in Market
A few philanthropic developers have attempted to solve the problem faced by visually impaired persons by developing some smart sticks, Eyeglasses and contact lens. However, our study of the existing solutions revealed that none of them provided a complete solution to the problem. While one application takes input as sequence of images, read the text and produces audio as output i.e. Eyeglasses, another uses sensors to simply detect objects and distance of that objects from user of that device and gives output in the form of vibration i.e.
Smart Sticks. There is no such device present in India‟s market which takes input as sequence of images, detects and recognizes the objects in it and produces the output in the form of voice instruction which is helpful for visually impaired person to plot the route while they walk themselves. In short there is no such complete device which will eliminate the dependency of visually impaired person upon normal person. In addition, all the existing solutions made by other countries, so it is not affordable by every Indian visually impaired person as per survey which we did.
Table 2: Existing Applications Sr.
No.
Application Name
Pros Cons
1 Freedom Lens
- Ability to read text - The text is then
converted into playback
-Unable to
recognize
obstacle in the path
2 OrCam - When it
comes to glasses then we have a Google glass - Read the text and converted into playback
- More expensive device
- Read or zoom only those texts or pictures which are indicated by you by making a gesture with your finger
3 Eye Stick -Picks up location bearings
-Unable to
recognize
obstacle in the
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-Sends feedback to blind
commuter via vibrations
path
To meet needs of Indian society, there is a requirement of a solution that can effectively and efficiently integrate Indian language and recognized the objects which aid visually impaired persons to overcome the dependency barrier. Existing applications available do not address this problem. They did not recognizes the objects in front of visually impaired person and are limited to English language and not all people in India can understand and talk in English, especially in rural areas.
C. Study of Existing Research Solutions
Some research papers we studied concentrated on helping the visually impaired persons. Some papers attempt to detect obstacles that are in front of visually impaired person and also calculate the distance of that obstacles form the user. Some papers suggest an approach for recognition of moving objects such as cars and humans by their motions, but this kind of applications mostly used in traffic surveillance, security or counting the human that entering in some stations or in shopping center and so on.
Following are excerpts and comments on some papers that were studied:
A. Appearance control by projector camera feedback for visually impaired [1]
The projector-based AR technique has the ability to change the appearance of real objects, and it can help to improve visibility for the visually impaired. They propose a new framework for appearance enhancement with a projector camera system that employs a model predictive controller. This framework enables arbitrary image processing such as photo-retouch software in the real world and it helps to improve visibility for the visually impaired.
In this article, they show the appearance enhancement results of Peil‟s method and Wolffshon‟s method for low vision, and Jefferson‟s method for color vision deficiencies.
The proposed system makes use of the projector-based AR technique. One of the drawbacks of this system is lack of detection and recognition of objects; it‟s just helpful for improving the visibility for visually impaired person.
B. Sound navigation aid system for the vision impaired [2]
Visually impaired or blind people are someone who lost their ability to see. They usually depend on guide cane or guide dog to assist them navigates their environment.
However, guide cane requires the blind to scan the surrounding manually with their hand while guide dog is expensive and has a short life span. There are many
researches on creating better navigation aid for blind people. Instead of using vibration or alarm to notify the distance of the obstacles, this research proposed the application of sound notification for the blind. This system is developed using MATLAB r2010a with the integrated webcam of the laptop and a laser pointer. The laser pointer acts as a reference point so that object‟s distance can be calculated from the captured image by the webcam. This system manages to calculate distance for any color of object under any level of brightness condition during day and night time. It also possesses human head movement ability to turn left and right, up and down. This system managed to detect the obstacles up to a distance of 432 centimeters, which is sufficient to prevent the blind from bumping into the obstacles.
The calculated distance is then converted to sound in order to notify the blind how far the object is away from them.
The proposed system is very useful for visually impaired person as he detect the objects and also calculates the distance of that objects from user and converted that calculated distance in sound, but this system is not able to recognize the objects or obstacles.
C. Obstacle detectors for visually impaired people [3]
The proposed system based on Electronic Travel Aid System (ETAS) for visually impaired people and describes a new wearable cognitive Aid System for blind people (CASBliP) developed within the frame of European CASBliP project. Information on the environment enables humans and vertebrates to know about sources that are in many different directions, particularly signals that are outside the detection range of other senses. Sound source localization is inherently important for safety-survival and navigation. In addition to the acoustical cues, the visual cues such as object detection, tracking and distance measurement play an important role in the navigation not only for robots, but also for blind people, since they are often dependent on artificial intelligence. Due to the fact that blind people make maximum use of sound not only to know the obstacle presence, but also how dangerous it is, in order to avoid it effectively , the CASBliP devices use acoustical sounds in order to represent the visual information detected by the sensors and artificial vision system.
This proposed system also aim to attempt for detection of objects by the sensors and artificial vision system and calculating distance of that objects from visually impaired person.
D. Smart phone-based Indoor guidance system for the visually impaired [4]
A smart phone camera based indoor guidance system to aid the visually impaired is presented. Most proposed systems for aiding the visually impaired with indoor navigation are not feasible for widespread use due to cost, usability, or portability. A smart phone vision- based indoor guidance system that is simple, accessible,
inexpensive, and discrete is developed to aid the visually impaired to navigate unfamiliar environments such as public buildings.
The system consists of a smart phone and a server. The smart phone captures and transmits pictures of the user‟s surrounding to the server. The server processes the images and matches them to a database of stored images of the building. After matching features, the location and orientation of the person is calculated using 3d location correspondence data stored for features of each image.
Positional information is then transmitted back to the smart phone and communicated to the user via text-to- speech.
The paper focuses on developing the vision technology for this unique application rather than building the complete system.
Its conclusion follows that we must need internet connection for transferring of captured images to the server for processing.
III. STATISTICAL RECORDS
To further analyze the extent and depth of the problem, we collected some statistics to illustrate the demographic distribution of visually impaired persons in India.
We collected age-specific data of visually impaired persons in India. [6]
Table 3: Age-wise distribution of Blind in India (Number of disabled persons per 100,000 persons)
Source: NSSO Report, 2002.
IV. OUR OBSERVATIONS AND CONCLUSION
According our study, we observed that if we want to eliminate the dependency between visually impaired people and normal people, we need to develop a technique that allows disabled persons to effectively and efficiently plot the route while they are walking themselves by detecting and recognizing the obstacles in
front of him. Existing solutions lack support for recognition of obstacles as we seen in our second paper in study of existing research solutions.
From the literature survey conducted, the demographical study, the study of existing applications and proposed solutions we come to the following conclusions:
1) Visually impaired persons dependent upon normal people to perform their day to day task. But this is not convenient as normal peoples are not supposed to free every time for guiding visually impaired person.
2) They usually depend on guide cane or guide dog to assist them navigates their environment. However, guide cane requires the blind to scan the surrounding manually with their hand while guide dog is expensive and has a short life span.
3) This dependency creates social divide and leads to dearth of equal opportunity for disabled people.
4) The application available doesn‟t give effective and efficient solution as they are not able to recognize the obstacles. In short there is no single application that integrates all the facets such as detection and recognition of obstacles and calculating the distance of that obstacles form the user.
5) There are some applications which require Internet connection to work.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENT
I wish to express my sincere gratitude to the administration of Department of Information Technology of VIIT, Pune, India. In particular I would like to thank Dr. Y. H. Dandawate, professor (VIIT, Pune) for his invaluable guidance.
REFERENCES
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