AI-based Wearable Vision Assistance System for the Visually Impaired: Integrating Real-Time Object Recognition and Contextual Understanding Using Large Vision-Language Models

Visual impairment affects the ability of people to live a life like normal people. Such people face challenges in performing activities of daily living, such as reading, writing, traveling and participating in social gatherings. Many traditional approaches are available to help visually impaired people; however, these are limited in obtaining contextually rich environmental information necessary for independent living. In order to overcome this limitation, this paper introduces a novel wearable vision assistance system that has a hat-mounted camera connected to a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (8GB RAM) with artificial intelligence (AI) technology to deliver real-time feedback to a user through a sound beep mechanism. The key features of this system include a user-friendly procedure for the recognition of new people or objects through a one-click process that allows users to add data on new individuals and objects for later detection, enhancing the accuracy of the recognition over time. The system provides detailed descriptions of objects in the user's environment using a large vision language model (LVLM). In addition, it incorporates a distance sensor that activates a beeping sound using a buzzer as soon as the user is about to collide with an object, helping to ensure safety while navigating their environment. A comprehensive evaluation is carried out to evaluate the proposed AI-based solution against traditional support techniques. Comparative analysis shows that the proposed solution with its innovative combination of hardware and AI (including LVLMs with IoT), is a significant advancement in assistive technology that aims to solve the major issues faced by the community of visually impaired people

A Hybrid Approach for COVID-19 Detection: Combining Wasserstein GAN with Transfer Learning

COVID-19 is extremely contagious and its rapid growth has drawn attention towards its early diagnosis. Early diagnosis of COVID-19 enables healthcare professionals and government authorities to break the chain of transition and flatten the epidemic curve. With the number of cases accelerating across the developed world, COVID-19 induced Viral Pneumonia cases is a big challenge. Overlapping of COVID-19 cases with Viral Pneumonia and other lung infections with limited dataset and long training hours is a serious problem to cater. Limited amount of data often results in over-fitting models and due to this reason, model does not predict generalized results. To fill this gap, we proposed GAN-based approach to synthesize images which later fed into the deep learning models to classify images of COVID-19, Normal, and Viral Pneumonia. Specifically, customized Wasserstein GAN is proposed to generate 19% more Chest X-ray images as compare to the real images. This expanded dataset is then used to train four proposed deep learning models: VGG-16, ResNet-50, GoogLeNet and MNAST. The result showed that expanded dataset utilized deep learning models to deliver high classification accuracies. In particular, VGG-16 achieved highest accuracy of 99.17% among all four proposed schemes. Rest of the models like ResNet-50, GoogLeNet and MNAST delivered 93.9%, 94.49% and 97.75% testing accuracies respectively. Later, the efficiency of these models is compared with the state of art models on the basis of accuracy. Further, our proposed models can be applied to address the issue of scant datasets for any problem of image analysis.