Open AccessA Cultural Heritage Experience for Visually Impaired People
Author(s) -
Alice Lo Valvo,
Domenico Garlisi,
Laura Giarr ́e,
Daniele Croce,
Fabrizio Giuliano,
Ilenia Tinnirello
Publication year - 2020
Publication title -
iop conference series. materials science and engineering
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 1757-899X
pISSN - 1757-8981
DOI - 10.1088/1757-899x/949/1/012034
Subject(s) - cultural heritage , visually impaired , mediation , computer science , human–computer interaction , artificial intelligence , geography , sociology , social science , archaeology
In recent years, we have assisted to an impressive advance of computer vision algorithms, based on image processing and artificial intelligence. Among the many applications of computer vision, in this paper we investigate on the potential impact for enhancing the cultural and physical accessibility of cultural heritage sites. By using a common smartphone as a mediation instrument with the environment, we demonstrate how convolutional networks can be trained for recognizing monuments in the surroundings of the users, thus enabling the possibility of accessing contents associated to the monument itself, or new forms of fruition for visually impaired people. Moreover, computer vision can also support autonomous mobility of people with visual disabilities, for identifying pre-defined paths in the cultural heritage sites, and reducing the distance between digital and real world.