LastStep: Vision-based Bus Stop Localization and Mapping for Improving Accessibility for Blind Riders: Poster Abstract

For people with visual impairment, the use of public transportation is a key ingredient to independent quotidian living. However, current electronic travel assistive systems that use GPS for navigation is imprecise to aid blind riders in navigating bus stops [1]. To address this problem, in this poster, we present a vision-based fine-grained bus stop localization system, LastStep, that complements a GPS unit and can localize a bus stop with step-level accuracy. With an evaluation on three subjects, we show that LastStep can localize sites with an error of less than 0.5 meters. Moreover, with the aid of LastStep, subjects can perform this localization at higher success rates and 4 times faster compared to manual searching.