iRetina: An Intelligent Mobile Application for the Visually Impaired in an Indoor Environment

Abstract

The Visually Impaired face a lot of problems while they carry out their day-to-day activities. Even though there are various ways that technologies have been used together to come up with a solution, there is still no proper, efficient, user-friendly, low-cost solution crafted just for them. Mobile Phones these days are beyond smartness, and they could be used to achieve so many things now compared to before. In this application, the camera of the mobile phone acts as the eyes for the Visually Impaired. The main purpose of this system is to intelligently navigate the visually impaired. This research covers some components namely, intelligent environmental identification by using the YOLOv4 object detection algorithm, calculation of distance by using the Inertial Measurement Unit (IMU) sensors, focusing, guiding and detecting the expiry date of packaged products, identifying and enhancing objects in a low-light environment. The communication between the system and the Visually Impaired will be a verbal voice communication through the microphones and the speakers of the mobile phone. The results presented show that the proposed application successfully achieves its goals by providing the required functionality.