Assistive technology for visually impaired individuals is extremely useful to make them independent of another human being in performing day-to-day chores and instill confidence in them. One of the important aspects of assistive technology is outdoor navigation for visually impaired people. While there exist several techniques for outdoor navigation in the literature, they are mainly limited to obstacle detection. However, navigating a visually impaired person through the sidewalk (while the person is walking outside) is important too. Moreover, the assistive technology should ensure low-energy operation to extend the battery life of the device. Therefore, in this work, we propose an end-to-end technology deployed on an edge device to assist visually impaired people. Specifically, we propose a novel pruning technique for transformer algorithm which detects sidewalk. The pruning technique ensures low latency of execution and low energy consumption when the pruned transformer algorithm is deployed on the edge device. Extensive experimental evaluation shows that our proposed technology provides up to 32.49% improvement in accuracy and 1.4 hours of extension in battery life with respect to a baseline technique.

在该研究中，我们提出了一种部署在边缘设备上的端到端技术，通过剪枝技术来检测人行道的变压器算法，从而保证了执行的低延迟和低能耗。实证评估结果显示，我们提出的技术相比基准技术在准确性上提升了32.49%，并且延长了1.4小时的电池寿命。

DISHA: 面向视障人士的低能耗稀疏边缘Transformer用于户外导航