(Computer) Vision Without Sight

Credit: Irwin Ramirez / The Seeing With Photography Collective

Computer vision holds the key for the blind or visually impaired to explore the visual world.

More than 20 million people in the U.S. live with visual impairments ranging from difficulty seeing, even with eyeglasses, to complete blindness. Vision loss affects almost every activity of daily living. Walking, driving, reading and recognizing objects, places, and people become difficult or impossible without vision. Thus, technology that can assist visually impaired (VI) people in at least some of these tasks may have a very relevant social impact.

Research in assistive technology for VI people has resulted in some very useful hardware and software tools in widespread use. The most successful products to date include text magnifiers and screen readers, Braille note takers, and document scanners with optical character recognition (OCR). This article focuses specifically on the use of computer vision systems and algorithms to support VI people in their daily tasks. Computer vision seems like a natural choice for these applications—in a sense, replacing the lost sense of sight with an "artificial eye." Yet, in spite of the success of computer vision technology in several other fields (such as robot navigation, surveillance, and user interface), very few computer vision systems and algorithms are currently employed to aid VI people. Read more...