Research on a Guide Dog Robot for Expressing Visual Environment by Voice

摘要

This paper proposed a guide dog robot that can express visual environment by voice. The guide dog robot uses NIC, a combination of CNN and LSTM methods, to recognize the visual scene and generate captions. The generated sentences are then converted to speech using speech synthesis to guide the visually impaired. The guide dog robot can not only guide the visually impaired person safely to their destination, but also providing explanation services of street scenes, enabling the visually impaired person to enjoy visual scenes. The system is consisted of visual scene recognition, caption, and speech synthesis. The effectiveness of the system is confirmed through experiments using the proposed guide dog robot.