Abstract
The visually impaired must face several well-known difficulties on their daily life. The use of technology in assistive systems can greatly improve their lives by helping with navigation and orientation, for which several approaches and technologies have been proposed. Lately, it has been introduced powerful online image processing services, based on machine learning and deep learning, promising truly cognitive assessment capacities. Google and Microsoft are two of these main players. In this work we built a device to be used by the blind in order to test the usage of the Google and Microsoft services to assist the blind. The online services were tested by researchers in a laboratory environment and by blind users on a large meeting room, familiar to them. This work reports on our findings regarding the online services effectiveness, the user interface and system latency.
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Acknowledgement
This work was supported by Project “NanoSTIMA: Macro-to-Nano Human Sensing: Towards Integrated Multimodal Health Monitoring and Analytics/NORTE-01-0145-FEDER-000016” financed by the North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (NORTE 2020), under the PORTUGAL 2020 Partnership Agreement, and through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF).
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Reis, A., Paulino, D., Filipe, V., Barroso, J. (2018). Using Online Artificial Vision Services to Assist the Blind - an Assessment of Microsoft Cognitive Services and Google Cloud Vision. In: Rocha, Á., Adeli, H., Reis, L., Costanzo, S. (eds) Trends and Advances in Information Systems and Technologies. WorldCIST'18 2018. Advances in Intelligent Systems and Computing, vol 746. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-77712-2_17
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