AN ELECTRONIC EYE FOR VISUALLY IMPAIRED

(NANOTECHNOLOGY)
PRESENTED BY G.PANNERSELVAM P.PRASAD 111 YR ECE

VELAMMAL ENGINEERING COLLEGE e- Mail address: pannerwelcome@yahoo.com shivpalprasad@yahoo.co.in

ABSTRACT
This paper proposes a method for detecting frontal pedestrian crossings from image data obtained with a single camera as a travel aid for the visually challenged. This would be mounted on a pair of glasses, will be capable of detecting the existence and location of a pedestrian crossing, to measure the width of the road, and to detect the color of the traffic lights. The process of detecting a crossing is a pre-process followed by the process for detecting the state of the traffic lights. It is important for the visually challenged to know whether or not a frontal area is a crossing. The existence of a

crossing is detected in two steps. In the first step, edge detection and pattern detection are employed to identify the crossing. In the second step, the existence of a crossing is detected by checking the periodicity of white lines on the road using projective invariants. Then the traffic light detector is used to check the pedestrian light and the time display. The calculated time is then compared with the average time needed for a blind person to cross. The observations are relayed through voice signals using the voice vision technology. Thus, this effective technology aids mobility for the visually impaired throughout the globe.

INDEX Introduction An overview of our Electronic Eye Functioning of the system

Image Analyzer Calculation of width of road and time required to cross it Traffic light detector Timing unit Voice speech system

Functional block Conclusion

INTRODUCTION
Blindness is the most feared of all human ailments. CROSSING busy roads can be a challenge for people with good vision. For blind people, it is a perilous activity. Our electronic eye aims at helping millions of blind and visually impaired people lead more independent lives. The electronic eye can be adapted to help the blind or visually impaired get around without a walking stick or seeing-eye dog. Canes and other travel aids with sonar or lasers can alert the user to approaching objects. Global Positioning Systems can tell what streets, restaurants, parks and other landmarks the user is passing. Devices like these are very good at giving locations and directions. But the limitations of G.P.S. technology mean that they cannot pin down the location of

a curb or crosswalk and frequently fail in areas that have many tall buildings and high traffic. None of these devices are able to specifically identify a crosswalk, nor do they have the potential for figuring out the state of the traffic signals. An effective

navigation system would improve the mobility of millions of blind people all over the world. Our new eye will allow blind people to cross electronic eye, which busy roads would be in total safety for the first time. Our mounted on a pair of glasses, will be capable of detecting the existence and location of a pedestrian crossing, and at the same time measure the width of the road to the nearest step and detect the color of the traffic lights.

AN OVERVIEW OF OUR ELECTRONIC EYE

A camera to capture the image of crossroads and traffic signals

A voice speech generator - used to instruct the user lights, this single camera can now give We have developed a system that is able to detect the existence of a pedestrian crossing in front of a blind person using a single camera. By measuring the width of the road and the color of traffic the blind all the information they need to cross a road in safety. The camera would be mounted at eye level, and be connected to a tiny computer. It will relay information using a voice speech

system and give vocal commands and information through a small speaker placed near the ear.

FUNCTIONING OF THE SYSTEM

CAMERA IMAGE ANALYSER CROSS ROAD 1 DETECTOR

1 TRAFFIC 2 LIGHT DETECTOR

VOICE 3 SPEECH GENERATOR

TIMING UNIT

TO USERS EAR

1 Tells the user whether any cross road is present 2 - Tells the user whether the traffic signal is favorable or not 3 Tells the user the time taken to cross the road. The style of crosswalks commonly used in India are known as zebra crossings and they feature a series of thick white bands that run in the same direction as the vehicle traffic. To detect the presence of a zebra crossing we use the projective

invariant which takes the distance between the white lines and a set of linear points on the edges of the white lines. This gives an accurate way of detecting whether crossing is present in a given image or not. The length of a pedestrian crossing is measured by projective geometry. The camera makes an image of the white lines painted on the road, and then the actual distances are

determined using the properties of geometric shapes as seen in the image. The traffic light detector checks images list of road signs. If the pedestrian light is ON, the voice speech system instructs the user to cross the road. Timer unit calculates the average time required by the visually challenged person to cross the road and tells it to the user via the voice speech system. .

for symmetrical shapes and compares them to a High-level scene interpretation applied to the processed images will produce a symbolic description of the scene. The symbolic description is then converted into verbal instructions appropriate to the needs of the user by using voice speech software CROSSROAD DETECTION The zebra crossing has alternate white bands running across the width of the road. This pattern has to be recognized to confirm the presence of a crossing. To detect basic shapes within the image, we make use of the Hough transform. At its simplest the Hough transform can be used to detect straight lines from edges detected in an earlier processing step. If the pixels detected fall on a straight line then they can be expressed by the equation: Y=mx+c The basis of the Hough transform is to translate the points in (x, y) space into (m,c) space using the equation: c=(-x)m+y PATTERN

IMAGE ANALYSER
The image analyzer contains the bitmap image, which has to be processed to detect the presence of a zebra crossing. Given an X-bit per pixel image, slicing the image at different planes (bit-planes) plays an important role in image processing. EDGE DETECTION One way to detect edges or variations within a region of an image is by using the gradient operator. There are several well-known gradient filters. In this experiment we use the Sobel gradients, which are obtained by convolving the image with two kernels, one for each direction.

Thus each point in (x,y) space (i.e. the image) represents a line in (m,c) space. Where three or more of these lines .

intersect a value can be found for the gradient (m) and intercept (c) of the line that connects the (x,y) space points

CALCULATION OF THE WIDTH OF THE ROAD AND TIME REQUIRED TO CROSS IT

Calculation of the width of the road is based on the concept of projection invariants. This requires us to define the term Cross Ratio. P4 P3 P2 L3 P1 L4 The cross ratio can defined for the four collinear points as, (P1, P2, P3, P4) = (P1P3/P2P3)/ (P1P4/P2P4) Where P1P2 is the distance P1 to P2. The cross ratio of the four lines is given by, (L1, L2, L3, L4) = (sin
13

L1 L2

/sin

23

)/ (sin

14

/sin

24

) L1 L2

Where ij is the angle between Li and Lj.

P1 L3 P2 P3 P4 L4

In the above figure, lines are constructed from the collinear points and in the adjacent figure a line is formed by joining the points in the lines L1, L2, L3, L4. A useful fact is that the crossratio of the original four points is equal to the cross-ratio of the constructed lines. To detect the presence of a zebra crossing we use the projective invariant which takes the distance between the white lines and a set of linear points on the edges of the white lines. The system effectively draws a virtual line out into the road. If a crosswalk is present, the edges of the painted white lines will form a predictable series of points along the virtual line. Let M and N be two distinct points of the projective space. Here we take points M and N as the points on the edges of the line formed on the image. The projective line between M and N consists of all points A of the form T = Calculated width of the road Distance covered by the user in one second Here ( , ) are the coordinates of A in the 2D linear subspace spanned by the coordinate vectors M and N. N is represented by (0, 1) and serves as the ``origin'' and M is represented by (1, 0) and serves as the ``point at infinity''. For an arbitrary point ( , ) (1,0) we can rescale ( , ) to =1 and represent A by its ``affine coordinates'', ( , 1) or just for short. Since we

have mapped M to infinity, this is just linear distance along the line from N. The time required to cross the road is calculated based on an assumption that the user covers a distance of one foot in a minute on an average. So, the time required to cover the calculated distance is calculated based on a simple logic. Generally, the time taken, T, to cross the road can be found out by

TRAFFIC LIGHT DETECTOR

The function of the traffic light detector is to recognize if the pedestrian light is on for the user to cross the road. If the user happens to reach the road when the pedestrian light is already on, the time indicated by the timer display in the traffic light must be detected and compared with the time required by the user to cross the road. If the user can cross the road safely, the voice speech system will instruct him to cross the road. This process can be effectively done by having an image database in the system and comparing the obtained image of camera to detect if pedestrian light is on and to detect the time left to cross the road. We have a large number of images and wish to select some of them, which are similar to a certain image (for example, the image of the pedestrian light). So we need a content-based image database system, which accepts an image as its input and retrieves all images like that by using some image

properties such as color, texture, shape and keywords. Every image is processed to recover the boundary contour, which is then represented by three global shape parameters and the maxima of the curvature zero-crossing contours in its Curvature Scale Space image. CURVATURE SCALE SPACE COMPUTATION AND MATCHING The CSS image is a multi-scale organization of the inflection points (or curvature zero-crossing points) of the contour as it evolves. Intuitively, curvature is a local measure of how fast a planar contour is turning. Contour evolution is achieved by first parametrizing using arc length. This involves sampling the contour at equal intervals and recording the 2-D coordinates of each sampled point. The result is a set of 2 coordinate functions (of arc length), which are then convolved, with a Gaussian filter of increasing width or standard deviation. Next step is to compute curvature on each smoothed contour.

As a result, curvature zerocrossing points can be recovered and mapped to the CSS image in which the horizontal axis represents the arc length parameter on the original contour, and the vertical axis represents the standard deviation of the Gaussian filter. The features recovered from a CSS image for matching are the maxima of its zero-crossing contours. The matching of two CSS images consists of finding the optimal horizontal shift of the maxima in one of the CSS images that would yield the best possible

overlap with the maxima of the other CSS image. The matching cost is then defined as the sum of pair wise distances (in CSS) between corresponding pairs of maxima. So, if an image of a pedestrian light in the image database finds a match with an image in the camera, the pedestrian can cross the road. The time in seconds required to cross the road is also detected based on the image of numbers in the database.

OBTAINED IMAGE

IMAGE DATABASE

PEDESTRIAN LIGHT DETECTION

TIMER UNIT

TIMING UNIT

The timing unit compares the calculated value T, the time required by the user to cross the road with the time left to cross the road T1, as identified

from the image (traffic signal time). If T < T1, the system instructs the user to

cross the road. Else it asks to wait till it is safe to cross the road. converted into verbal instructions appropriate to the needs of the user.

VOICE SPEECH SYSTEM

AUDITORY REPRESENTATION IMAGE

VOICE VISION The VOICE VISION technology for the totally blind offers the experience of live camera views through sophisticated image-to-sound renderings. If we have a 64 * 64, 16 gray tone image, the 64-channel sound synthesis maps the image into an exponentially distributed frequency interval for a one second visual sound. The VOICE mapping: vertical positions of points in a visual sound are represented by pitch, while horizontal by positions are represented time-after-click.

`The images captured by the camera are swept from left to right at little less than one image per second. The pixels in each column generate a particular sound pattern, consisting of a combination of frequencies based on that specific set of Pixels. The result is an auditory signature effectively an inverse spectrogram that characterizes the particular image. High-level scene interpretation applied to the processed images will produce a symbolic description of the scene. The symbolic description is then

Brightness is represented by loudness. In this manner, pixels become... voicels!

FUNCTIONAL BLOCK

START CAPTURE THE IMAGE IMAGE ANALYSER

ANALYSE THE IMAGE @ YES IS THERE ANY CROSS ROADS NO

INFORM THE USER THAT A CROSSROAD IS DETECTED

CROSS ROAD DETECTOR

@ CALCULATE THE WIDTH OF THE ROAD

DETECT THE TRAFFIC LIGHT

IS THE LIGHT YES FAVOURABLE? CALCULATE THE TIME TAKEN TO CROSS THE ROAD (A)

TRAFFIC NO INFORM THE USER TO WAIT LIGHT DETECTOR

IDENTIFY THE TIME LEFT IN THE TRAFFIC SIGNAL (B)

YES

IF A<B

NO TIMER UNIT

INFORM THE USER TO CROSS THE ROAD

INFORM THE USER TO WAIT

STOP

CONCLUSION
The development of mobility aids for the visually impaired is a challenging task that has many potential solutions. A sophisticated mechanism designed to enhance the mobility of the blind is intended to help people who cannot recover their eyesight by normal medical procedures.

Blind pedestrians in the greatest danger are those who must cross wide, busy roads. This system along with the available low technology aids can relieve the visually challenged of being dependent on others and lead normal lives. This effective navigation system would improve the mobility of millions of blind people all over the world.