SmartEyes : An Object Identification System for the Visually Impaired

The dawning of the computer era has opened a world of new possibilities and solutions to solving the many challenges faced by the visually impaired in their quest for autonomous living. According to researcher Yasser Ebrahim the visually impaired faces two principal challenges when interacting with their environment. One of which is to sense and identify the objects surrounding them. This is commonly referred to as the information problem. In this paper we present a mobile phone computer vision system SmartEyes, which is directed at solving the information problem. The prototype is capable of identifying any object without having to prefix them with RFID tags and other sensory devices. Photos received from the mobile phone imagery device are processed to identify the object in the image. Object identification is achieved through a real time Image recognition engine. The system is capable of identifying products, famous landmarks, artwork, logos, text and popular images found online etc. During the testing and evaluation phase of this research SmartEyes recorded a 100% accuracy level.