Special Time: 11:00 AM, Zoom Colloquium: OKO - app that uses computer vision to assist blind and visually impaired people

Special Time: 11:00 AM, Zoom Colloquium: OKO - app that uses computer vision to assist blind and visually impaired people

Event Date

Thursday, September 1st, 2022 – 11:00am to 12:00pm

Speaker

Computer Scientist, Michiel Janssen

Host

James Coughlan

Abstract

AYES is a Belgian-based company that is co-founded by three computer scientists. Our journey started when our visually impaired family friend, Bram, told us about the challenges he faced while navigating outdoors. Quite quickly we realized that current assistive technologies are outdated and could benefit from artificial intelligence.

For that reason, we started developing a mobile application, called OKO, that uses the smartphone camera and computer vision to assist people in their daily lives. Crossing the street is a very stressful task if there is no pedestrian signal installed that blind or low-vision people can detect. For that reason, we've developed a feature capable of detecting the pedestrian traffic light. So far, we have identified 70.000+ safe crossings. Our goal now is to bring this technology to the USA since a lot of cities are experiencing difficulties with installing pedestrian signals that can be used by all. In recent months we've also added public transport recognition which identifies the bus number and destination to get people on the right bus. In the future, we'll add more computer vision-related features to deliver an even better navigation experience.

Event Category

Event Type