Camera Phone Based Tools for People with Visual Impairments

In this paper we describe a set of applications that utilize a camera phone to help the visually impaired with daily tasks. Our “MobileEye” software suite turns a camera enabled mobile device into a multi-purpose vision tool that helps individuals with visual disabilities. MobileEye consists of four subsystems for different types of visual disabilities. A color channel mapper helps distinguish colors, a software magnifier helps low vision individuals see detail, a pattern recognizer helps the severely impaired recognize objects and a document retriever provides access to printed materials. We apply cutting edge computer vision and image processing technologies on the mobile devices and tackle the challenges of limited computational resources and low image quality. We also consider the usability for the visually impaired so our system requires minimum keyboard operation. We provide a full software solution which runs on Symbian and Windows Mobile handsets. This paper provides a high level overview of the system.