SoundEyes: Obstacle Audiodescription for People with Visual Impairment
Abstract
Visually impaired individuals often face challenges when navigating unfamiliar or dynamic environments, where access to real-time spatial information is limited. This paper presents the development of SoundEyes, an assistive technology for visually impaired individuals that employs computer vision techniques to recognize objects and generate real-time audio descriptions. Designed for mobile devices with limited resources, the system uses an edge computing architecture and Bluetooth communication to ensure low latency and high autonomy. In practical tests with mobile devices, SoundEyes achieved a total response time of less than one second in HVGA mode on mid-range devices and demonstrated greater detection accuracy in XGA mode, showing promise for both dynamic and static environments.References
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Dissanayake, D. M. L. V., Rajapaksha, R. G. M. D. R. P., Prabhashawara, U. P., Solanga, S. A. D. S., and Anuradha Jayakody, J. A. D. C. (2021). Guide-me: Voice authenticated indoor user guidance system. In IEEE Ubiquitous Computing, Electronics & Mobile Comm. Conf. (UEMCON), pages 0509–0514.
Google LLC (2024). Google Text-to-Speech (gTTS) API.
Howard, A. G., Zhu, M., Chen, B., Kalenichenko, D., Wang, W., Weyand, T., Andreetto, M., and Adam, H. (2017). Mobilenets: Efficient convolutional neural networks for mobile vision applications.
Jocher, G., Chaurasia, A., and Qiu, J. (2023). Ultralytics yolov8.
Osama, M., Yehia, A., Mohamed, S., Sherief, R., Elmasry, N., Adel, V., and Hamdy, A. (2021). Design and implementation of visually impaired assistant system. In Int. Mobile, Intelligent, and Ubiquitous Comp. Conf., pages 303–310.
Redmon, J., Divvala, S., Girshick, R., and Farhadi, A. (2016). You only look once: Unified, real-time object detection.
Supekar, A. and Patil, S. (2022). Design and development of portable navigation system for disabled person using image, text and audio. In IEEE Delhi Section Conference (DELCON), pages 1–4.
World Health Organization (2019). World Report on Vision. World Health Organization, Geneva, Switzerland. Acesso em: 19 jan. 2025.
Published
2025-07-20
How to Cite
GOMES, Jerson V. P.; OLIVEIRA, Wallace F.; OLIVEIRA, Fellipe G.; DINIZ, Rafael H. N.; SOUZA, Matheus A.; CUNHA, Felipe D..
SoundEyes: Obstacle Audiodescription for People with Visual Impairment. In: PROCEEDINGS OF BRAZILIAN SYMPOSIUM ON UBIQUITOUS AND PERVASIVE COMPUTING (SBCUP), 17. , 2025, Maceió/AL.
Anais [...].
Porto Alegre: Sociedade Brasileira de Computação,
2025
.
p. 51-60.
ISSN 2595-6183.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.5753/sbcup.2025.8130.
