Towards Supporting People with sight loss in Dynamic Indoor spacing by Utilizing Surveillance Cameras

Abstract

Navigating unfamiliar places often creates various challenges for visually impaired people (VIPs), thus restricting their independence. Recent studies on indoor wayfinding for VIPs mostly focuses on large spaces such as airports and hospitals, overlooking more compact spaces such as cafes, halls and other smaller venues. These spaces are often characterised by their dynamic nature, with people constantly moving and furniture being rearranged. It leads to user needs that are not sufficiently met by existing assistive technologies (ATs), and poses technical challenges when de veloping cost-effective solutions. The challenges in visiting unfamiliar dynamic environments (UDEs) and the required informa tion to support navigation and wayfinding were investigated as a user study with ten VIPs. This study involved methods for interviewing participants and observing them perform walking jour neys in an unfamiliar room. The qualitative analysis reveals user requirements, useful verbal guid ance and preferred method of their delivery. The need for addressing localisation and mapping was highlighted in the user study as key functional requirements. When developing affordable ATs in UDEs, surveillance cameras have good potential as a plat form because they are widely available infrastructure. This lead to investigating people localisa tion under occlusion and generating semantic representation of dynamic environments from a single view stationary camera.