A Wearable Face Recognition System Built into a Smartwatch and the Visually Impaired User

Practitioners usually expect that real-time computer vision systems such as face recognition systems will require hardware components with high processing power. In this paper, we present a concept to show that it is technically possible to develop a simple real-time face recognition system in a wearable device with low processing power – in this case an assistive device for the visually impaired. Our platform of choice here is the first generation Samsung Galaxy Gear smartwatch. Running solely in the watch, without pairing to a phone or tablet, the system detects a face in the image captured by the camera, and then performs face recognition (on a limited dictionary), emitting an audio feedback that either identifies the recognized person or indicates that s/he is unknown. For the face recognition approach we use a variation of the K-NN algorithm which accomplished the task with high accuracy rates. This paper presents the proposed system and preliminary results on its evaluation.