An efficient, dense and long-range marker system for the guidance of the visually impaired

Abstract

In this paper, we address the problem of making a mobile/smartphone camera sensitive to distant fiducial markers. To this end, we carefully design a novel visual marker that is both dense and readable from large distances. The main novelty of the proposed marker is the combination of a quaternary color-based coding system with robust methods for reading the color patterns included in each frame once it is detected. These patterns include a CRC whose length grows linearly, whereas that of the message grows quadratically. Our experiments show that the proposed bundle marker-vision algorithm outperforms the alternatives in terms of distance and angle and also that it is very robust to changes in lighting conditions, thus making it a good intelligent system for guiding people with visual impairments in their day to day use of public transportation systems.