Determining a Blind Pedestrian's Location and Orientation at Traffic Intersections.

This paper describes recent progress on Crosswatch, a smartphone-based computer vision system developed by the authors for providing guidance to blind and visually impaired pedestrians at traffic intersections. One of Crosswatch's key capabilities is determining the user's location (with precision much better than what is obtainable by GPS) and orientation relative to the crosswalk markings in the intersection that he/she is currently standing at; this capability will be used to help him/her find important features in the intersection, such as walk lights, pushbuttons and crosswalks, and achieve proper alignment to these features. We report on two new contributions to Crosswatch: (a) experiments with a modified user interface, tested by blind volunteer participants, that makes it easier to acquire intersection images than with previous versions of Crosswatch; and (b) a demonstration of the system's ability to localize the user with precision better than what is obtainable by GPS, as well as an example of its ability to estimate the user's orientation.

SMARTPHONE-BASED CROSSWALK DETECTION AND LOCALIZATION FOR VISUALLY IMPAIRED PEDESTRIANS.

This paper describes recent work on the "Crosswatch" project [7], which is a computer vision-based smartphone system developed for providing guidance to blind and visually impaired travelers at traffic intersections. A key function of Crosswatch is self-localization - the estimation of the user's location relative to the crosswalks in the current traffic intersection. Such information may be vital to users with low or no vision to ensure that they know which crosswalk they are about to enter, and are properly aligned and positioned relative to the crosswalk.

A database for medicinal plants used in treatment of asthma.

Unlabelled: The knowledge of most plants used in the treatment of asthma, the plant part which is effective in treatment is confined to very few persons who are engaged in folklore medicine. However, this form of medicine is not very popular. Therefore, it is of considerable interest to ethno-botanical community to understand the plants and the parts used for treatment.