Using mobile phones while walking for activities that require continuous focus on the screen, such as texting, has become more and more popular in the last years. To avoid colliding with obstacles, such as lampposts and pedestrians, focus has to be taken off the screen in regular intervals. In this paper we introduce SpareEye, an Android application that warns the smartphone user from obstacles in her way. We use only the camera of the phone and no special hardware, ensuring that it requires minimal effort from the user to use the application during everyday life. Experimental results show that we can detect obstacles with high accuracy, with only some false positives and few false negatives.

Top