Guardian Angel: A Novel Walking Aid for the Visually Impaired

TL;DR

Guardian Angel is a smartphone app that helps visually impaired individuals navigate traffic safely by detecting objects, estimating distances and directions, and alerting users to potential dangers, improving their crossing experience.

Contribution

This paper presents a novel Android app that uses pretrained object detection and estimation techniques to assist visually impaired pedestrians without specialized hardware.

Findings

Higher satisfaction scores in pedestrian crossing with the app

Reduced average crossing time with app assistance

App is freely available on Google Play Store

Abstract

This work introduces Guardian Angel, an Android App that assists visually impaired people to avoid danger in complex traffic environment. The system, consisting of object detection by pretrained YOLO model, distance estimation and moving direction estimation, provides information about surrounding vehicles and alarms users of potential danger without expensive special purpose device. With an experiment of 8 subjects, we corroborate that in terms of satisfaction score in pedestrian-crossing experiment with the assistance of our App using a smartphone is better than when without under 99% confidence level. The time needed to cross a road is shorter on average with the assistance of our system, however, not reaching significant difference by our experiment. The App has been released in Google Play Store, open to the public for free.