AVII [assist vision impaired individual]: an intelligent indoor navigation system for the vision impaired individuals with vlc

Abstract

Vision impaired individuals confront unique challenges every day in their day-to-day life when navigating in unfamiliar public locations. The proposed system focuses on designing a device for vision impaired people that is comfortable, user friendly and can help with travelling independently. The solution is an audio guidance system that provides guidance through voice commands and beep sounds. In this study, authors propose an indoor navigation system that utilizes visible light communication (VLC) technology, which employs LED lights, geomagnetism technology, best path detection algorithms and obstacle detection aimed at supporting visually impaired people to overcome the positioning and navigating problems. System uses a MCU based mechanism to transmit positional information by leveraging the existing LED lights of the indoor environment. The study looks at an improved version of Dijkstra's algorithm to estimate search time and distance to find the best path for the navigation purposes. Geomagnetic sensor is used to obtain the travelling direction of the visually impaired individual to provide an extreme accurate system to take the turns accurately according to the best path and to correct the individual while traveling. Sonar sensors are used for obstacle detection which aids the individual to prevent any collisions or injury. Database optimization involves in increasing the speed and efficiency of the retrieved data and reduces the system response time.