  It is estimated that 285 million people globally are visually impaired. A
majority of these people live in developing countries and are among the elderly
population. One of the most difficult tasks faced by the visually impaired is
identification of people. While naturally, voice recognition is a common method
of identification, it is an intuitive and difficult process. The rise of
computation capability of mobile devices gives motivation to develop
applications that can assist visually impaired persons. With the availability
of mobile devices, these people can be assisted by an additional method of
identification through intelligent software based on computer vision
techniques. In this paper, we present the design and implementation of a face
detection and recognition system for the visually impaired through the use of
mobile computing. This mobile system is assisted by a server-based support
system. The system was tested on a custom video database. Experiment results
show high face detection accuracy and promising face recognition accuracy in
suitable conditions. The challenges of the system lie in better recognition
techniques for difficult situations in terms of lighting and weather.
