New Frontiers in Communication and Intelligent Systems
An Approach for Discovering Space by the Blind using an Ontology-based Map and Data from Existing Open Maps
Authors: Dariusz Mikulowski, Marek Pilski and Grzegorz Terlikowski
Publishing Date: 30-04-2022
ISBN: 978-81-95502-00-4
Abstract
Nowadays, navigation with efficient quality to an unknown place is often performed by everyone. To go forward with this, we usually reach for one of the Internet maps, enter data about the scheduled trip and search for a new route. The visually impaired individuals VI have an even greater need to take advantage of this activity because, while walking independently, they have to find their destination and follow the previously developed route avoiding dangerous places without loosing a proper way. However, despite many publicly available online mapping services, they have great difficulties with this issue. For this reason, the journey becomes much stressful and unsafe for them. Unfortunately, the information acquired from various dedicated GPS-based mobile applications is usually insufficient for this purpose. VI needs a more detailed description of an environment that contains information about different objects, i.e., pedestrian crossings, entrances to buildings or bus stops and relationships between them. To enable this detailed exploration, we propose a method that assigns a new route, describes it with the ontological object map and assigns 3-D binaural sound patterns to them. For this purpose, we use dedicated domain ontology. Apart from the attributes such as coordinates and size, each object has the appropriate physical location and other properties described as semantic data. These conditions are expressed as corresponding relationships, i.e., being a neighbour or being on. Such sets of objects are also described using three-dimensional binaural sound scenes. They are linked to ontology using a special relationship called "Has-Sound-Scene". Our concept has been implemented as a simple application that uses ontology, data downloaded from the Open Street Map and audio samples recorded with the binaural sound method. It has a mechanism for determining routes and assigning sound signals to them. The application was tested by two VI users and has received positive opinions.
Keywords
Blind traveller, Object map ontology, Sound description of space.
Cite as
Dariusz Mikulowski, Marek Pilski and Grzegorz Terlikowski, "An Approach for Discovering Space by the Blind using an Ontology-based Map and Data from Existing Open Maps", In: Rahul Srivastava and Aditya Kr. Singh Pundir (eds), New Frontiers in Communication and Intelligent Systems, SCRS, India, 2022, pp. 207-214. https://doi.org/10.52458/978-81-95502-00-4-23