CDI-Type II: Collaborative Research: Cyber Enhancement of Spatial Cognition for the Visually Impaired

对于任何希望拥有独立生活方式的人来说，找路是一项必不可少的能力。它需要成功地执行几项任务，包括导航和物体和地点识别，所有这些都需要对周围环境进行准确的评估。对于视力受损的人来说，这些任务可能非常难以完成，而且其中任何一项都有失败的风险。导盲犬和白色手杖分别被广泛用于导航和环境感知。然而，前者的训练要求昂贵，而且往往令人望而却步，而后者只能提供关于S环境中的障碍的线索。通过使用合适的传感器和传感器融合算法，感知可以提供位置、方向、局部几何形状、对象描述等信息和环境线索，从而提高人类在视觉信息相关任务中的表现。大多数关于寻路辅助的工作都集中在户外环境，并导致了基于语音的GPS导航系统的开发，这些系统提供描述街道、地址和兴趣点的信息。相比之下，可用于室内导航的有限技术需要对建筑基础设施进行重大改造，其高昂的成本阻碍了它的广泛使用。这一方案采取了多方面的方法来解决视力受限者的室内导航问题。它利用机器人学、计算机视觉和盲人空间认知与界面设计行为研究的专业知识，指导发现室内导航系统的信息需求和最佳交付方法。设计感知和导航算法，在微型商用硬件上实现，同时明确考虑视障人士的空间认知能力，将导致室内导航系统的开发，该系统将帮助盲人完成寻路任务，同时促进认知地图的开发。

Wayfinding is an essential capability for any person who wishes to have an independent life-style. It requires successful execution of several tasks including navigation and object and place recognition, all of which necessitate accurate assessment of the surrounding environment. For a visually-impaired person these tasks may be exceedingly difficult to accomplish and there are risks associated with failure in any of these. Guide dogs and white canes are widely used for the purpose of navigation and environment sensing, respectively. The former, however, has costly and often prohibitive training requirements, while the latter can only provide cues about obstacles in one?s surroundings. Human performance on visual information dependent tasks can be improved by sensing which provides information and environmental cues, such as position, orientation, local geometry, object description, via the use of appropriate sensors and sensor fusion algorithms. Most work on wayfinding aids has focused on outdoor environments and has led to the development of speech-enabled GPS-based navigation systems that provide information describing streets, addresses and points of interest. In contrast, the limited technology that is available for indoor navigation requires significant modification to the building infrastructure, whose high cost has prevented its wide use. This proposal adopts a multi-faceted approach for solving the indoor navigation problem for people with limited vision. It leverages expertise from robotics, computer vision, and blind spatial cognition with behavioral studies on interface design to guide the discovery of information requirements and optimal delivery methods for an indoor navigation system. Designing perception and navigation algorithms, implemented on miniature-size commercially-available hardware, while explicitly considering the spatial cognition capabilities of the visually impaired, will lead to the development of indoor navigation systems that will assist blind people in their wayfinding tasks while facilitating cognitive-map development.