An Optical Navigation System for Visually Impaired People

People with visual impairment have many problems navigating their environment, particularly severe when that environment is unfamiliar. GPS-based route finding systems have performance limitations that mean that they can only guide the user to the general vicinity of their destination (the location of the building) rather than the precise location required (the door of the building). There are no systems available today that can do this, so a visually impaired person still requires assistance from another person to complete their journey over the last 10 yards in an unfamiliar environment. This project will address this problem and give a greater degree of independence to its users. We will develop a head-mounted sensing system embedded in a set of normal spectacles that can guide a person from an approximate starting point towards a precisely defined end point selected from a menu.