A Mobile-Cloud Collaborative Traffic Lights Detector for Blind Navigation

—Context-awareness is a critical aspect of safe navigation, especially for the blind and visually-impaired in unfamiliar environments. Existing mobile devices for contextaware navigation fall short in many cases due to their dependence on specific infrastructure requirements as well as having limited access to resources that could provide a wealth of contextual clues. In this work, we propose a mobile-cloud collaborative approach for context-aware navigation, where we aim to exploit the computational power of resources made available by Cloud Computing providers as well as the wealth of location-specific resources available on the Internet to provide maximal context-awareness. The system architecture we propose also has the advantages of being extensible and having minimal infrastructural reliance, thus allowing for wide usability. A traffic lights detector was developed as an initial application component of the proposed system and experiments performed to test appropriateness for t...

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2010
• Where: MDM
• Authors: Pelin Angin, Bharat K. Bhargava, Sumi Helal
• Keywords: Communications, MDM 2010, Minimal Infrastructural Reliance, Mobile-cloud Collaborative Approach, Specific Infrastructure Requirements