Abstract
Approximately 310,000 visually impaired people are currently living in Japan. For the people, going outside is a risky task. In fact, it is often reported that they fall from a platform or stairs. In order to prevent such accidents, it is possible to develop a system for navigating around obstacles including platform and stairs using GPS. However, GPS cannot be used indoors. This paper presents a system of detecting an indoor staircase leading downward. The proposed system combines the Hough transform and a phase-only correlation method to increase the performance of the system. The proposed system is composed of a common camera and a common laser-pointer. Experiments show that the proposed method achieved 96.6% accuracy within 0.2∼0.7 seconds computation time.
