ARAware: assisting visually impaired people with real-time critical moving object identification
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Author(s)
Surougi, Hadeel Ridha Surougi
Zhao, Cong
McCann, Julie
Type
Journal Article
Abstract
Autonomous outdoor moving objects like cars, motorcycles, bicycles, and pedestrians present different risks to the safety of Visually Impaired People (VIPs). Consequently, many camera-based VIP mobility assistive solutions have resulted. However, they fail to guarantee VIP safety in practice, i.e., they cannot effectively prevent collisions with more dangerous threats moving at higher speeds, namely, Critical Moving Objects (CMOs). This paper presents the first practical camera-based VIP mobility assistant scheme, ARAware, that effectively identifies CMOs in real-time to give the VIP more time to avoid danger through simultaneously addressing CMO identification, CMO risk level evaluation and classification, and prioritised CMO warning notification. Experimental results based on our real-world prototype demonstrate that ARAware accurately identifies CMOs (with 97.26% mAR and 88.20% mAP) in real-time (with a 32 fps processing speed for 30 fps incoming video). It precisely classifies CMOs according to their risk levels (with 100% mAR and 91.69% mAP), and warns in a timely manner about high-risk CMOs while effectively reducing false alarms by postponing the warning of low-risk CMOs. Compared to the closest state-of-the-art approach, DEEP-SEE, ARAware achieves significantly higher CMO identification accuracy (by 42.62% in mAR and 10.88% in mAP), with a 93% faster end-to-end processing speed.
Date Issued
2024-07
Date Acceptance
2024-06-24
Citation
Sensors, 2024, 24 (13)
ISSN
1424-8220
Publisher
MDPI
Journal / Book Title
Sensors
Volume
24
Issue
13
Copyright Statement
© 2024 by the authors.
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland.
This article is an open access article
distributed under the terms and
conditions of the Creative Commons
Attribution (CC BY) license (https://
creativecommons.org/licenses/by/
4.0/).
License URL
Identifier
https://www.mdpi.com/1424-8220/24/13/4282
Publication Status
Published
Article Number
4282
Date Publish Online
2024-07-01