CDI-Type II: Collaborative Research: Cyber Enhancement of Spatial Cognition for the Visually Impaired

CDI-Type II：协作研究：视觉障碍者空间认知的网络增强

• 批准号: 0835714
• 负责人: Kostas Daniilidis
• 金额: $ 45万
• 依托单位: University of Pennsylvania
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2008
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2008-09-15 至 2012-08-31
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=0835714&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: CDI; Type; II; Collaborative; Research

Wayfinding is an essential capability for any person who wishes to have an independent life-style. It requires successful execution of several tasks including navigation and object and place recognition, all of which necessitate accurate assessment of the surrounding environment. For a visually-impaired person these tasks may be exceedingly difficult to accomplish and there are risks associated with failure in any of these. Guide dogs and white canes are widely used for the purpose of navigation and environment sensing, respectively. The former, however, has costly and often prohibitive training requirements, while the latter can only provide cues about obstacles in one?s surroundings. Human performance on visual information dependent tasks can be improved by sensing which provides information and environmental cues, such as position, orientation, local geometry, object description, via the use of appropriate sensors and sensor fusion algorithms. Most work on wayfinding aids has focused on outdoor environments and has led to the development of speech-enabled GPS-based navigation systems that provide information describing streets, addresses and points of interest. In contrast, the limited technology that is available for indoor navigation requires significant modification to the building infrastructure, whose high cost has prevented its wide use. This proposal adopts a multi-faceted approach for solving the indoor navigation problem for people with limited vision. It leverages expertise from robotics, computer vision, and blind spatial cognition with behavioral studies on interface design to guide the discovery of information requirements and optimal delivery methods for an indoor navigation system. Designing perception and navigation algorithms, implemented on miniature-size commercially-available hardware, while explicitly considering the spatial cognition capabilities of the visually impaired, will lead to the development of indoor navigation systems that will assist blind people in their wayfinding tasks while facilitating cognitive-map development.

对于任何希望拥有独立生活方式的人来说，寻路是一项必备能力。它需要成功执行多项任务，包括导航、物体和地点识别，所有这些都需要对周围环境进行准确评估。对于视障人士来说，这些任务可能极其难以完成，并且任何一项任务失败都存在风险。导盲犬和白手杖分别广泛用于导航和环境感知。然而，前者的培训要求昂贵且往往令人望而却步，而后者只能提供有关周围障碍物的线索。通过使用适当的传感器和传感器融合算法提供信息和环境线索（例如位置、方向、局部几何形状、对象描述）的传感，可以提高人类在视觉信息相关任务上的表现。大多数寻路辅助工具的工作都集中在室外环境，并导致了基于语音的 GPS 导航系统的开发，该系统提供描述街道、地址和兴趣点的信息。相比之下，室内导航可用的技术有限，需要对建筑基础设施进行重大改造，而其高昂的成本阻碍了其广泛使用。该提案采用多方面的方法来解决视力有限人士的室内导航问题。它利用机器人技术、计算机视觉和盲空间认知的专业知识以及界面设计的行为研究来指导室内导航系统的信息需求和最佳交付方法的发现。设计感知和导航算法，在微型商用硬件上实现，同时明确考虑视障人士的空间认知能力，将导致室内导航系统的发展，该系统将帮助盲人完成寻路任务，同时促进认知能力。地图开发。