Indoor Map Learning for the Visually Impaired

Trip planning is useful for every traveler, especially for visually impaired people because they can learn maps and routes prior to their upcoming journey. Research on trip planning for the visually impaired has been more attention in the past decade. However, past methods have some limitations: (a) the methods usually made use of special visualization interfaces that are costly; (b) the methods mainly focused on outdoor navigation due to existing online map and GIS databases. Although this approach could be extended to indoor navigation, it would need substantial additional effort to generate indoor maps. Therefore, the above limitations make trip planning unfeasible to most of visually impaired people. In this paper, we propose a novel trip planning framework by applying gamification concept, which particularly deals with indoor scenarios. First indoor accessible maps are automatically generated, and then, a mobile app will be designed and implemented for the visually impaired. This will allow users to learn building layouts and routes prior to their travel. The proposed trip planning method can be easily adapted to other indoor scenes, and it will encourage the visually impaired users to travel easily and independently.