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INTRODUCTION

The National Institutes of Healths Healthy People 2010 Midcourse Review states that
vision and hearing are defining elements of the quality of life. In general, low vision and
blindness increase significantly with age across all racial and ethnic groups, and by the age of
65 approximately one third of the population has some form of vision-reducing eye disease.
The most common eye diseases among people aged 40 years and older are age-related
macular degeneration, cataract, diabetic retinopathy and glaucoma. The number of
individuals in the U.S. who are affected by age-related macular degeneration alone is
expected to increase from 1.75 million individuals currently to almost 3 million by 2020.
This research focuses on assisting individuals with blind spots in their
visual field. Such conditions may be caused by two specific diseases: Ushers syndrome, a
condition that combines loss of hearing and loss of peripheral vision due to retinitis
pigmentosa, and macular degeneration, a disorder that affects central vision. Similarly to
Ushers syndrome, advanced glaucoma and cerebrovascular accidents (strokes) often cause
peripheral visual field loss, impairing the affected patients ability to navigate in crowded
areas, cross streets, or perform tasks like reading and writing which require scanning. As in
the case of macular degeneration, macular edema caused by diabetes mellitus causes loss of
central vision, impairing the ability to read or recognize faces.
Previous research on systems for low vision assistance includes the work of Luo and
Peli [1]. A head mounted display along with an augmented-vision device superimposes
contour images over the users field of vision for tunnel vision assistance. The head mounted
display is monocular and interacts with the processing device, which receives input from a
head mounted camera. The system uses a combination of buzzers and a target contour to
assist a user with tunnel vision in finding the designated target. However, a dedicated device
requires specialized hardware, which can be costly and difficult to carry.
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Figure 1:First hand preview of proposed system

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MOBILE LOW VISION ASSISTANCE SYSTEM

A prototype solution for mobile low vision assistance was developed and evaluated on
an Android smart phone platform. A user interface was designed to identify the users
preferred screen location for viewing, which is a region free of blind spots. Once the
preferred location is identified, the user has the option to adjust the image rendering
parameters, such as zoom and contrast, in order to maximize the effectiveness of the display.
After initialization, the system locates faces as regions of interest and redisplays them in the
users preferred location. Face tracking is used to track the detected face between consecutive
frames, while face detection takes place every few seconds to reduce the computational load.
By enabling users to visualize the primary face in the visual field, the proposed
system enables face to face communication for users with blind spots. They are able to
observe facial expressions, read lips and even follow gestures.
An example of the system output is shown in Figure 1, with the blind spot superimposed on
the image. Viewing of the persons facial expression is enabled in this example due to face
redrawing at a preferred location of the visual field.
When designing a system on a mobile platform, two quantities are of prime
importance: processing time, (i.e., the time between the user query and the response), and
power consumption, (i.e., the power demands of each algorithm and therefore the expected
battery life). One approach is to perform all processing on the smartphone, and another is to
compress the images and transmit to a cloud-computer for processing.
The decision on the processing platform depends on the available computational and
communication capabilities. In this paper, we consider three platforms: a smartphone, a
netbook and a desktop simulating cloud processing. Since face detection and tracking are

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computationally demanding tasks, we benchmarked the performance of the following

algorithms. For face detection, we evaluated the popular Viola-Jones algorithm, Support
Vector Machines, and a method by Pai et al. For face tracking, we examined template
matching, Lucas-Kanade tracking and CAMShift.

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FACE DETECTION ALGORITHMS
The Viola-Jones detector [3] is considered one of the best performing near-frontal face
detection algorithms for both speed and complexity. It is based on a combination of weak
classifiers (boosting) to obtain an efficient strong classifier. Each weak classifier is tasked to
learn one of three Haar-like features in a 24x24 pixel sub-window: a two-rectangle
feature, a three-rectangle feature or a four-rectangle feature. Instead of running weak
classifiers on a basic image, each image is transformed into an integral image, allowing fast
feature extraction, since any Haar classifier can be computed from simple lookup table entries
in the integral image.
The algorithm performs early rejection if the combination of the weak classifiers (one
for each feature) is below a threshold for a test sub-window. Since most of the subwindows in
an image are negative (non-faces), the algorithm rejects them at the earliest stage. When used
together, the selected group of weak classifiers becomes a strong classifier through a
process called boosting. The most used technique, originally used by Viola and Jones, is
AdaBoost. Support vector machines (SVMs) are popular classifiers used to separate two
classes, (e.g., faces and non-faces) [4]. During training, the SVM determines the hyperplane
that maximizes the separation margin between the training data classes. The optimal
hyperplane is obtained by maximizing a convex quadratic programming problem. In cases
where the data cannot be linearly separated, the kernel trick is employed to transform the
input data into a higher dimensional space _, where the transformed data become linearly
separable.
Pai et al is a color-based algorithm that uses the color of human skin as well as the
geometry of the human face to detect faces quickly. Lighting compensation is accomplished
by computing the average luminosity of the image and compensating for the different color
channels to generate a chrominance image. After some filtering, skin detection is performed
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in chrominance space. Finally, bounding boxes are determined for the face-colored blobs
found in the image [5]. With regions of potential faces identified, numerous geometric tests
are run to validate face regions.

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FACE TRACKING ALGORITHMS

The template based approach is an iterative localization algorithm that employs the
sum-of-squared differences to locate the region that corresponds to the tracked target.
Template matching requires a large number of comparisons in order to determine the region
with the best match, but it imposes mild memory requirements.
The Lucas-Kanade method of tracking uses sparse optical flow to track objects . The
optical flow is a differential method that assumes a location patch of pixels has spatial
coherence, i.e., pixels around a feature tend to move in the same direction, as they likely
belong to the same object. To find pairs of features, a robust feature detector is used, such as
the Harris corner detector. Additionally, it is assumed that pixel values around a chosen
feature point remain constant.
Continuously adaptive mean shift (CAMShift) is an object tracking algorithm that
tracks both the objects coordinates and its color probability distribution. The base of the
algorithm, mean shift, works by adapting from frame to frame the color probability
distributions in the tracked region. A color histogram look-up for the region is taken from the
HSV transformed image, and color probability distribution of the region is found. The center
of mass contained within the search window is found and the next search window is updated.

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Figure 2: Face tracking

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CONCLUSION

This system assisting individuals with blind spots in their visual field. This technology
incorporates existing face detection techniques and tracking algorithms to develop a novel
system that would help people with visual impairness just using their smartphone. A user
interface was designed to identify the users preferred screen location for viewing, , the
system locates faces as regions of interest and redisplays them in the users preferred location.

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REFERENCES

1. P. Viola and M. Jones, Rapid object detection using a boosted cascade of simple features,
in Proc. of the IEEE Computer Society Conf. on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition
(CVPR), 2001, vol. 1, pp. I511I518.

2. B. Lucas and T. Kanade, An iterative image registration technique with an application to

stereo vision, in Proc. of 7th Intl. Joint Conf. on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI '81), 1981, pp.
674-679.

3. www.wikipedia.com

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