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An Affordable Intelligent Navigation Backpack for the Visually Impaired: Deep Learning-Based Obstacle Detection and Real-Time Navigation with RGB-D Integration

Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: According to the World Health Organization (WHO), approximately 285 million people worldwide suffer from some form of visual impairment, including 39 million who are blind and an additional 246 million experiencing severe visual impairment. Existing navigation aids often fail to provide a user-centric perspective, relying on secondary judgment and leading to inconvenience. High-tech devices, such as smart glasses and robots, offer more effective solutions but are frequently cost-prohibitive. This study presents an affordable, first-person perspective intelligent navigation backpack for the visually impaired, utilizing deep learning. The system integrates RGB images and depth maps via alignment algorithms, extracts obstacle contours through binary image processing, and detects obstacles in real-time using the YOLO model. Experimental results demonstrate that the navigation depth camera significantly outperforms traditional ultrasonic and LiDAR sensors, achieving up to 98% measurement accuracy.
Authors: Cheng-Li Luo, Hai Xu, Min Liu, Shu-Chuan Chu
Language: English
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4408824108
FWCI: 5.452
Cites:
Cited by: 3
Related to: 10