Person localization using a wearable camera towards enhancing social interactions for individuals with visual impairment

Individuals with visual impairments are at a loss when it comes to everyday social interactions as majority (65%) of these interactions happen through visual non-verbal media. Recently,efforts have been made towards development of an assistive technology called the Social Interaction Assistant [14] which enables access to such useful cues so as to compensate for the lack of vision and other visual impairments. There have been studies which enumerate the important needs of such individuals when they interact in social situations. Along with feedback about their own social behavior, these studies indicate that individuals with visual disabilities are interested in a number of cues related to the people in their surroundings. In this paper, we discuss the importance of person localization while building a human-centric assistive technology which addresses the essential needs of the visually impaired users. Next, we describe the challenges that arise when a wearable camera setup is used as an input source in order to perform person localization. Finally, we present a computer vision based algorithm adapted to handle the issues that are inherent when such a wearable camera setup is used and demonstrate its performance on a number of example sequences.