A Light and Smart Wearable Platform with Multimodal Foundation Model for Enhanced Spatial Reasoning in People with Blindness and Low Vision

TL;DR

This paper introduces a lightweight, wearable assistive device enhanced with a multimodal foundation model that significantly improves spatial reasoning and environmental understanding for people with blindness and low vision.

Contribution

It presents a novel spatially-aware multimodal large language model integrated into a wearable device, improving navigation and object recognition for visually impaired users.

Findings

Enhanced environmental understanding and navigation accuracy

Significant improvements in object recognition performance

Positive user feedback on device usability and effectiveness

Abstract

People with blindness and low vision (pBLV) face significant challenges, struggling to navigate environments and locate objects due to limited visual cues. Spatial reasoning is crucial for these individuals, as it enables them to understand and interpret the spatial relationships in their surroundings, enhancing their ability to navigate and interact more safely and independently. Current multi-modal large language (MLLM) models for low vision people lack the spatial reasoning capabilities needed to effectively assist in these tasks. Moreover, there is a notable absence of lightweight, easy-to-use systems that allow pBLV to effectively perceive and interact with their surrounding environment. In this paper, we propose a novel spatial enhanced multi-modal large language model based approach for visually impaired individuals. By fine-tuning the MLLM to incorporate spatial reasoning capabilities, our method significantly improves the understanding of environmental context, which is critical for navigation and object recognition. The innovation extends to a hardware component, designed as an attachment for glasses, ensuring increased accessibility and ease of use. This integration leverages advanced VLMs to interpret visual data and provide real-time, spatially aware feedback to the user. Our approach aims to bridge the gap between advanced machine learning models and practical, user-friendly assistive devices, offering a robust solution for visually impaired users to navigate their surroundings more effectively and independently. The paper includes an in-depth evaluation using the VizWiz dataset, demonstrating substantial improvements in accuracy and user experience. Additionally, we design a comprehensive dataset to evaluate our method's effectiveness in realworld situations, demonstrating substantial improvements in accuracy and user experience.