Crosswatch: A system for providing guidance to visually impaired travelers at traffic intersections

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe recent progress on the “Crosswatch” project, a smartphone‐based system developed for providing guidance to blind and visually impaired travelers at traffic intersections. Building on past work on Crosswatch functionality to help the user achieve proper alignment with the crosswalk and read the status of walk lights to know when it is time to cross, the authors outline the directions Crosswatch is now taking to help realize its potential for becoming a practical system: namely, augmenting computer vision with other information sources, including geographic information systems (GIS) and sensor data, and inferring the user's location much more precisely than is possible through GPS alone, to provide a much larger range of information about traffic intersections to the pedestrian.Design/methodology/approach – The paper summarizes past progress on Crosswatch and describes details about the development of new Crosswatch functionalities. One such functionality, ...