Low-cost stereo vision system for supporting the visually impaired's walk

This paper presents an obstacle detection system for the visually impaired to use with a walking stick. The system in this work can find obstacles applying the depth discontinuities Pixel-to-Pixel (P2P) stereo algorithm which is one of the Intensity-based Stereo Matching (ISM) techniques in stereo vision that can find objects with featureless surface such as whiteboard, door, etc. However, the ISM technique is time consuming and not fast enough for real-time usage. Applying parallel computing using Message Passing Interface (MPI) helps reduce the computing time and enables realtime usage. In this work, we estimate the distance between objects and the visually impaired by applying the V-disparity. Our system can accurately detect objects within the range of 5 meters using 12-centimeter based-line low-cost webcams.