Assisting blind persons

Abstract

The use of technology to assist challenged people in their everyday life is one of the noblest and fruitful exploits of modern technology, thereby ensuring an independent and constraint-free way of life. Visually impaired and blind citizens need all the help available to safely lead a regular life especially where the use of eyesight is essential and vital. The adoption of smart phones and the functionality available of such phones, coupled with the deployment of intelligent applications on these same phones, blind persons are able to take advantage and employ the technology on smart phone to function and perform instead of their eyes. This paper presents a system, myEyes, that performs a very basic operation that visually-abled persons take for granted and perform instinctively, that of recognising and distinguishing between different money bills. myEyes is an extendible object recognition platform that employs a number of feature detection algorithms and feature descriptors to accurately match key points of images while matching frames from a video-stream with a database of tagged images.