MR.NAVI: Mixed-Reality Navigation Assistant for the Visually Impaired

TL;DR

MR.NAVI is a mixed-reality navigation system that uses computer vision and natural language processing to assist visually impaired users in unfamiliar environments, providing real-time scene understanding and navigation guidance.

Contribution

The paper introduces MR.NAVI, a novel mixed-reality system combining computer vision, NLP, and public transit integration for enhanced spatial awareness of visually impaired users.

Findings

Effective real-time scene understanding and navigation guidance.

Positive user study results demonstrating usability.

Successful obstacle avoidance and environment description.

Abstract

Over 43 million people worldwide live with severe visual impairment, facing significant challenges in navigating unfamiliar environments. We present MR.NAVI, a mixed reality system that enhances spatial awareness for visually impaired users through real-time scene understanding and intuitive audio feedback. Our system combines computer vision algorithms for object detection and depth estimation with natural language processing to provide contextual scene descriptions, proactive collision avoidance, and navigation instructions. The distributed architecture processes sensor data through MobileNet for object detection and employs RANSAC-based floor detection with DBSCAN clustering for obstacle avoidance. Integration with public transit APIs enables navigation with public transportation directions. Through our experiments with user studies, we evaluated both scene description and navigation functionalities in unfamiliar environments, showing promising usability and effectiveness.