Forums PSPGen

As you know, Blind Assistant is a software aiming to help visually impaired
people through a set of technologies like voice recognition, voice synthesis,
algorithms for artificial vision, all running in a single homebrew.

The application, developed at Visilab Research Center of the University of
Messina, doesn't require a complex and expensive hardware to work,
but it can be executed on a simple PSP-2000 with 64 Mb of ram.

The last Blind Assistant CFW0005, released a year ago, surprised the world
for its great complexity. In the meantime, Visilab was working on the weak
points of the software in order to make it more reliable and powerful.

The result is Blind Assistant CFW0006: probably the most complex homebrew
ever released. You can download the homebrew here:

http://visilab.unime.it/~filippo/BlindA ... istant.htm

We have created some videos about what Blind Assistant can actually do:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bDSW7RaCixs

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=584mAXwd4dQ

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMGGySlbDeo

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=omFylu5jdFY



At the actual stage, Blind Assistant provides seven functionalities:

1) Voice clock and calendar Pressing the START key, the blind can obtain the
date and the time by the console

2) Face recognition The system uses the PentLand Component Analysis (PCA)
algorithm, speeded up by the use of Sony VFPU, for recognizing the names
and the position of the people that are present in that moment in the room. In
this release, it has been implemented a new memory manager that manages
dinamically the available ram, allowing to obtain better performances.

3) Position recognition Using the SIFT (Scalar Image Feature Transform)
algorithm, Blind Assistant is able to recognize the room where the blind is.
As the SIFT algorithm is too computationally expensive for the small processor
of PSP, the image is sent via wi-fi to a server, called BlindServer, that runs
on a x86 PC. The SIFT analysis is done inside the server and the answer is
returned via wi-fi. In this new version of Blind Assistant, the client tries to
connect to the server everytime it is necessary, and not only at startup like
in the previous releases.

4) Optical char recognition Blind Assistant is able to read a text in a frame
grabbed by the camera. For this new release, a new technology has been
implemented: ndTesseract (it replaces the old ndOcrad engine for the
internal scanning method).

ndTesseract is a version of the OCR originally developed by Google, that is
able to run, for the first time in the world, on the small MIPS processor of the
Sony console. The result is of extra-ordinary importance, because Tesseract
is actually the OCR, among the open-source solutions, that provides the best
recognition rate. The execution of a complex software like Tesseract inside
an homebrew has been made possible using the Varangozov memory
manager, a new technology that will be released in the next Nanodesktop 0.5
and that will make the nd applications up to three times faster than now.


5) Data matrix scanner Blind Assistant is able to recognize the data matrix
labels, compatible with standard ISO/IEC 16022:2006 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_matrix_(computer)).

This new functionality is very important, because the data matrix labels can be
used for object recognition, collision avoidance, for reading the content of
different boxes, for reading the labels of the drugs etc. The scanner operates
at a frequency of 1 Hz and it is able to recognize the labels independently
from rotations, scaling or variation in pose. The content is read to the blind
through the integrated voice synthesizer

6) Mail reader. Blind Assistant integrates a small mail reader. Thanks to the
introduction of the ndVMIME library, the software is able to manage both HTML
or plain text mails now. Furthermore, during the other operations of the
system, a daemon is run in background: it checks, every nn minutes, if new
mails have arrived. In this case, a voice advice is emitted and the blind is
invited to read the new messages that have arrived.

7) Fixer tools When Blind Assistant encounters some error conditions, like
errors in the database stored in the memory stick, it executes automatically
some routines that fix the problem without any necessity of operations by
the user.


Blind Assistant requires a PSP-2000 and a Sony GoCam camera. A reduced
version of the software for PSP-1000 users (sharing the same source code,
but with many functionalities disabled) is provided too. At startup Blind
Assistant Loader shall select automatically the core that is right for your
platform.

The users of the old Blind Assistant CFW0005 can update their application via
internet using the automatic update feature.

I want to remember you, in fact, that Blind Assistant is able to auto-update
itself with the new versions released by Visilab.



I hope that this tool can be useful, and that the staff can dedicate a news
in home for this notice.

Thanks in advance
Filippo Battaglia

Yea man this is huge. I mean not only is it good for blind people obviously, but in a coder's perspective, a shit load of work was put into this.

I would love to see the source code when/if released.

You can find the source code in Visilab website.
It is released under GPL license.

Wow, I had no idea this project existed!
Thanks for the news + information