Despite significant effort on novel wireless and mobile applications for sighted people, novel wireless and mobile applications to improve the wellbeing of visually impaired individuals remain largely underexplored. The biggest everyday challenge for visually impaired individuals is safe and quick navigation to reach a desired destination in unfamiliar outdoor/indoor environments. Outdoor navigation for unsighted people can be greatly facilitated by GPS-based aids which unfortunately do not work in indoor environments lack of GPS signals. This proposal outlines a challenging research plan on developing, prototyping, and evaluating a secure and usable indoor navigation system for the visually impaired. The scientific promise of the proposed research will expand the fundamental understandings about indoor navigation for the visually impaired with the potential to open a new research direction. Successful development and implementations of the proposed techniques will have profound impact on allowing visually impaired individuals to have indoor navigation and wayfinding as sighted people, thus significantly improving the mobility and wellbeing of millions of visually impaired users in the US and around the world.
The proposed research consists of six main research thrusts. The first thrust is to investigate novel crowdsourcing-based techniques to construct accurate indoor floor plans for arbitrary indoor venues with or without large open spaces. The second thrust is to develop secure cooperative techniques to detect and minimize the impact of fake mobility traces submitted by dishonest crowdsourcing workers. The third thrust is to investigate crowdsourcing-based construction of an indoor image database that can well characterize and visualize an indoor venue. The fourth thrust is to develop crowdsourcing-based techniques to enable accurate point-to-point indoor navigation for the visually impaired. The fifth thrust is to investigate novel techniques that can provide visually impaired individuals enhanced indoor navigation experience similar to what sighted persons can get. The last thrust is to implement the proposed indoor navigation system and thoroughly evaluate its efficacy, efficiency, and usability.
