A Smartphone-Based Virtual White Cane Prototype Featuring Time-of-Flight 3D Imaging

Thanks to the advancements in Time-of-Flight depth perception technologies, new approaches emerge to support visually impaired people in their everyday life. This chapter presents a novel Electronic Travel Aid prototype based on a miniaturized and smartphone integrated Time-of-Flight 3D imaging camera. The presented Electronic Travel Aid prototype robustly detects obstacles, thanks to the introduction of two innovative concepts: a combination of v disparity and RANSAC algorithm and the so-called Conservative Polar Histogram. An obstacle detection and warning rate of up to 7 FPS is achieved by the prototype. Furthermore, our prototype considerably outperforms the object detection performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches.