InSight: A Mobile Assistant Helping Visually Impaired People Navigate Unfamiliar Environment
Human-Computer Interaction
Summary
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Authors
Junwei Zheng, Jiale Wei, Di Wen, Yufan Chen, Ruiping Liu, Chengzhi Wu, Kunyu Peng, Kailun Yang, Jiaming Zhang
Abstract
Navigating unfamiliar outdoor environments is one of the most demanding everyday tasks for people with visual impairments (PVI). However, existing navigation systems cannot simultaneously satisfy the needs of informative perception and precise localization during navigation. This paper explores the core navigation demands of PVI through a preliminary study. Based on the results of the pre-study, we present the design of InSight, a mobile assistant that combines scene descriptions with precise localization to support PVI navigating unfamiliar outdoor environments. The offline mode of InSight runs entirely on device for real-time navigation, while the online mode streams camera frames to a self-hosted server for arbitrary object detection and accurate localization. Finally, a user study with 21 visually impaired participants validates that InSight could assist users in navigating unfamiliar outdoor environments with increased success rate and confidence compared to mainstream navigation applications like Apple Maps.