Student clinches Best Paper Award at international image processing conference

YANG Kailun, a PhD candidate in ZJU’s College of Optical Science and Engineering, recently won the only Best Paper Award at the 2018 International Conference on Frontiers of Image Processing (ICFIP 2018) held on March 9-11 in Barcelona, Spain.

The paper is titled “Long-range Traversability Awareness and Low-lying Obstacle Negotiation with RealSense for the Visually Impaired”. It was jointly penned by ZJU’s visual assisting technology team, led by Dr. WANG Kaiwei, and the RobeSafe team from the University of Alcalá in Spain.

The paper proposes a novel and effective approach to combining a pair of wearable smart glasses and a waist-worn pathfinder to assist the visually impaired. Traversable lines are generated to feedback the visually impaired through real-time stereo sounds after real-world coordinates adjustment with a RealSense R200 (RGB-D sensor) and an IMU integrated in smart glasses. Low-lying obstacles are detected by using another RGB-D sensor of RealSense, the RS410, as the waistworn pathfinder to provide early warning. Indoor and outdoor detection results as well as a field test demonstrate the usefulness and effectiveness of this technology.