Virtual white cane featuring time-of-flight 3D imaging supporting visually impaired users

Supporting visually impaired people in their everyday's life is of crucial importance. Thanks to the technological advancements in semiconductors and cyber-physical systems, novel powerful tools and capabilities emerged recently. The integration of miniaturized Time-of-Flight 3D imaging modules combined with vast CPU and GPU power into commercially available smart phones, is a major enabler for a future virtual white cane aiding visually impaired people. This work presents a virtual white cane prototype which in particular targets visually impaired persons and vulnerable road users in general. It exploits the unique 3D environment perception features of a commercially available smart phone in order to perceive the environment in a three dimensional way based on the Time-of-Flight 3D imaging technology. This work not only introduces new concepts, such as a combined v disparity / RANSAC ground plane detection and the so-called Conservative Polar Histogram, it also considerably outperforms the object detection performance compared to state-of-the-art approaches.