5 years of implementing light to help the visually impaired at the National Optical Instrument Engineering Technology Research Center

According to the World Health Organization, 285 million people around the world are estimated to be visually impaired and 39 million of them are blind. It is rather challenging for visually impaired people (VIP) to navigate through obstacles and avoid various hazards such as water puddle and approaching vehicles in unknown environments. At the National Optical Instrument Engineering Technology Research Center, a number of revolutionary techniques and apparatus have been explored to address the above problems. An eff ective approach is studied to expand the detection of traversable area based on an RGB-D sensor, which is compatible with both indoor and outdoor environments. Th e depth image of is enhanced with IR image largescale matching and RGB image-guided fi ltering. A polarized technique is implemented in order to detect traversable areas and water hazards by adequately considering polarization eff ects. A real-time crosswalk detection algorithm, adaptive and consistency aextraction analysis (AECA), is proposed to detect and remind the position of crosswalks at urban intersections