Blind Assistant

Blind Assistant is an attempt to realize a software that can help men and children that are blind or visual impaired. The software is designed to run not on complex and expensive hardware devices, but on simple and cheap devices as Sony Playstation Portable (PSP).

Blind Assistant uses Nanodesktop tecnology for windows environment, it is able to speak with the user using ndFLite, a porting of the speech synthesis engine originally developed by the Carnegie Mellon University and it is able to recognizes the name and the position of the people that are present in that moment in your room, using complex algorithms (as Intel EigenFaces/PentLand PCA).

The face recognition tecnology is provided using ndOpenCV, a porting of the original Intel OpenCV libraries that has been developed by the same author of the Blind Assistant and of the Nanodesktop SDK.

Filippo Battaglia's version of ndOpenCV improves the Intel code because the algorithms have been modified in way to use EMI (Enhanced Mathematical Interface), an API integrated in Nanodesktop system, and written totally in assembly, that is able to use Sony VFPU to speed up the necessary computations. Using EMI, we can obtain the necessary CPU power.

The actual version of BlindAssistant is able to recognize the name of the people that are present in front of the blind.

Furthermore, Blind Assistant uses a client/server architecture with a second component called Blind Server, designed to run on a X86 PC, and that uses wi-fi connection to communicate with the client.

Through Blind Server, the mobile unit can execute calculus more complex than the  CPU power of the PSP could allow otherwise. Using BlindServer, the PSP can execute an image analisys: it can determinate the room where the blind is. During this elaboration, BlindServer uses the SIFT algorithm (Scalar Image Features Transform), a complex tecnology developed by Robert Hess and that is able to recognize the more significative points in an image.

Blind Assistant for PSP is able to read a simple text, too. The software for PSP integrates a copy of the Ocrad OCR engine.  It includes also a particular communication protocol that allows to the client the interrogation of the Blind Server, via wireless. This last program, furthermore, integrates a more powerful OCR that is used for decoding the image sent by the PSP: its name is Tesseract, the known software developed by HP e released by the Google Foundation.

In ideal conditions, Blind Assistant and Tesseract via BlindServer have reach a recognition rate of 90%.

Blind Assistant integrates also a color scanner, that allows to the blind the recognition of a color in an object and a mail reader, a software that allows the receiving of mails and short messages.

The software supports the Sony GoCam webcam or the Eyeserver tecnology. It works either on Sony PSP-FAT or Sony PSP-SLIM.

The author

 

The author of Blind Assistant is Filippo Battaglia, an electronic engineer graduated at University of Messina. I want to thank my teacher, the coordinator of Visilab, prof. Giancarlo Iannizzotto for the support and the guidance. I want also to thank Fabio Sfuncia for the support in the hosting of the HTML site. 

 

If you have troubles in Blind Assistant installation, you can write me to pegasus2000@email.it or you can send a message to Nanodesktop official forum at www.psp-ita.com.

 

Download

 

This program works only on PSP custom firmwares. It has been tested (under PSP FAT and SLIM) with the CF 3.71 M33-4, 3.80 e 3.90 M33-3. The program is able to auto-update itself using the wireless connection.

 

Download BlindAssistant PSP core CFW005 + BlindServer 1.1 for X86 (sources and binaries)

 

(package version B)

License and terms of use

The source code is released under GPL license. You can use this program only for not commercial uses. See the file Blind Assistant License.Pdf in the package for further details.