Recent trends in computer vision-driven scene understanding for VI/blind users: a systematic mapping

Abstract

AbstractDuring the past years, the development of assistive technologies for visually impaired (VI)/blind people has helped address various challenges in their lives by providing services such as obstacle detection, indoor/outdoor navigation, scene description, text reading, facial recognition and so on. This systematic mapping review is mainly focused on the scene understanding aspect (e.g., object recognition and obstacle detection) of assistive solutions. It provides guidance for researchers in this field to understand the advances during the last four and a half years. This is because deep learning techniques together with computer vision have become more powerful and accurate than ever in tasks like object detection. These advancements can bring a radical change in the development of high-quality assistive technologies for VI/blind users. Additionally, an overview of the current challenges and a comparison between different solutions is provided to indicate the pros and cons of existing approaches.