  Intelligent assistive systems can navigate blind people, but most of them
could only give non-intuitive cues or inefficient guidance. Based on computer
vision and vibrotactile encoding, this paper presents an interactive system
that provides blind people with intuitive spatial cognition. Different from the
traditional auditory feedback strategy based on speech cues, this paper firstly
introduces a vibration-encoded feedback method that leverages the haptic neural
pathway and enables the users to interact with objects other than manipulating
an assistance device. Based on this strategy, a wearable visual module based on
an RGB-D camera is adopted for 3D spatial object localization, which
contributes to accurate perception and quick object localization in the real
environment. The experimental results on target blind individuals indicate that
vibrotactile feedback reduces the task completion time by over 25% compared
with the mainstream voice prompt feedback scheme. The proposed object
localization system provides a more intuitive spatial navigation and
comfortable wearability for blindness assistance.
