An Automated Ar-Based Annotation Tool for Indoor Navigation for Visually Impaired People

Authors

Pei Du, Portland State UniversityFollow
Nirupama Bulusu, Portland State UniversityFollow

Published In

ACM SIGACCESS

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

10-2021

Subjects

Human-centered systems -- Accessibility, Ubiquitous computing, Augmented reality

Abstract

Low vision people face many daily encumbrances. Traditional visual enhancements do not suffice to navigate indoor environments, or recognize objects efficiently. In this paper, we explore how Augmented Reality (AR) can be leveraged to design mobile applications to improve visual experience and unburden low vision persons. Specifically, we propose a novel automated AR-based annotation tool for detecting and labeling salient objects for assisted indoor navigation applications like NearbyExplorer. NearbyExplorer, which issues audio descriptions of nearby objects to the users, relies on a database populated by large teams of volunteers and map-a-thons to manually annotate salient objects in the environment like desks, chairs, low overhead ceilings. This has limited widespread and rapid deployment. Our tool builds on advances in automated object detection, AR labeling and accurate indoor positioning to provide an automated way to upload object labels and user position to a database, requiring just one volunteer. Moreover, it enables low vision people to detect and notice surrounding objects quickly using smartphones in various indoor environments.

Rights

© 2021 Copyright held by the owner/author(s).

Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the owner/author(s).

Description

The 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS ’21), October 18–22, 2021, Virtual Event, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA,

Locate the Document

https://doi.org/10.1145/3441852.3476561

DOI

10.1145/3441852.3476561

Persistent Identifier

https://archives.pdx.edu/ds/psu/37556

Citation Details

Pei Du and Nirupama Bulusu. 2021. An automated AR-based annotation tool for indoor navigation for visually impaired people. In The 23rd International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS ’21), October 18–22, 2021, Virtual Event, USA. ACM, New York, NY, USA, 4 pages.