Smartphones as Visual Prosthesis

Abstract

Smartphone have become far more widely used during last decade. Ubiquitous daily computation power along with a rich set of sensors have added value to our life significantly. It has provided the opportunity to improve the quality of life for visually impaired people. The camera embedded in these mobile devices has enabled researchers to explore different ways to augment the vision sense as a solution for visually impaired people. Indoor and outdoor navigation systems that provide tactile or audio feedback and magnification applications have used the camera in some extent. People with more moderate vision loss tend to avoid technologies that use tactile and audio feedback. Therefore, those techniques that enhance vision can highly benefit them. This study is research and development of a magnifier prototype developed on smartphone platform for visually impaired people. This magnifier is operated by hand gestures. Our prototype offers a way to easily scroll and pan through the magnified content. The algorithm will be technically evaluated. In the last phase an experiment will be conducted to compare the prototype with normal magnifier software that only uses the device’s camera.