Developing assistive technologies that can help the visually impaired navigate environments and avoid obstacles is a pressing challenge. New advances in the fields of 5G, computer vision, and haptics may help solve this problem.
In the new paper “Network-Aware 5G Edge Computing for Object Detection: Augmenting Wearables to “See” More, Farther and Faster”, published in IEEE Access, a large group of researchers, including our own Ph.D. candidate Alain Boldini and Prof. Maurizio Porfiri, showcased a solution based on a wearable platform. The platform includes a computer vision system and a haptic feedback device, in the form of a belt, to communicate with users. The computer vision system leverages a network-aware video compression algorithm to offload computations to the cloud, exploiting 5G connectivity whenever possible.
Read the full paper here.
Image credit: Yuan et al.