iCARE interaction assistant: a wearable face recognition system for individuals with visual impairments

ABSTRACT

This presentation demonstrates a working prototype of the iCare Interaction Assistant, a wearable assistive device based on research aimed at facilitating the social interactions of people who are blind or visually impaired. Using a tiny unobtrusive camera mounted inside the nose bridge of a pair of eyeglasses, this prototype is able to learn and recognize faces at a distances up to 10 feet, thus allowing the user to initiate conversations with persons in their vicinity, without waiting for others to approach them. Ongoing work is aimed at facilitating the subsequent verbal interaction by recognizing and interpreting non-verbal communication, including eye contact, facial expressions, emotions, and gestures.

REFERENCES

• 1: http://www.kit.ac.jp/english/index.html
• 2: The vOICe. http://www.seeingwithsound.com.
• 3: iCARE Projects. http://cubic.asu.edu.
• 4: M. Turk, and A. Pentland. Face recognition using Eigenfaces, Proceedings of IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, pp. 586--591, 1991.
• 5: Sreekar Krishna , Greg Little , John Black , Sethuraman Panchanathan, A wearable face recognition system for individuals with visual impairments, Proceedings of the 7th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility, October 09-12, 2005, Baltimore, MD, USA [doi>10.1145/1090785.1090806]

INDEX TERMS

Primary Classification:
  J. Computer Applications
  J.0 GENERAL

General Terms:
Design, Experimentation, Performance

Keywords:
assistive device for visually impaired, face recognition, social interaction aide, wearable computing