An Efficient Indoor Navigation Technique To Find Optimal Route For Blinds Using QR Codes

TL;DR

This paper presents a cost-effective indoor navigation app for blind users using QR codes and audio instructions, enabling easy, hardware-free navigation with optimal route guidance and deviation correction.

Contribution

A novel indoor navigation system for the blind that uses QR codes for location detection and provides audio-guided, optimal route navigation without additional hardware.

Findings

More user-friendly than existing approaches

Cost-effective solution for blind indoor navigation

Provides accurate and optimal route guidance

Abstract

Blind navigation is an accessibility application that enables blind to use an android Smartphone in an easy way for indoor navigation with instructions in audio form. We have proposed a prototype which is an indoor navigation application for blinds that uses QR codes. It is developed for android Smart phones and does not require any additional hardware for navigation. It provides automatic navigational assistance on pre-defined paths for blind. QR codes are placed on the floor sections after specific distance that acts as an input for current location detection and navigation. Whenever a QR code is scanned it provides the user with the information of the current location and asks the user to select the destination and then offers optimal and shortest path using path finding algorithms. During navigation whenever the deviation from the proposed path is detected it prompts the user and guides back to the right path by comparing the current path with the generated path. All of the instructions throughout the application are provided in audio form to the user. The interface of the application is well built for blinds which makes the smart phones user-friendly and useable for blind people. The user interacts with the application through a specific set of user-friendly gestures for specific inputs and operations. At the end, we have performed comparison between different state of art approaches and concluded that our approach is more user friendly, cost effective and produced more accurate results.