Blind navigation using ambient crowd analysis

Research in assistive technology has been on the rise over the last decade. Numerous solutions and consumer products have flooded the market to guide visually impaired making use of beacon technology, depth cameras and many more. Though certain products and solutions are available for highly structured and regular indoor environments, we are still a long way from an industrial level product for unstructured, dynamic and irregular outdoor environments. Our work harnesses the decision making power of sighted individuals and crowd as a group surrounding the visually impaired. This information extraction from the crowd along with coarse terrain mapping of major obstacles like footpath edges, walls and large pot holes will help the subject to navigate dynamic and irregular environments. This out of the box approach provides us the margin to use low grade equipment and develop algorithms with low computational complexity. The paper explains the theoretical aspects of this approach along with its proof of concept and some remarkable results achieved in real life implementation.