Title: Pathfinding for the navigation of visually impaired people

Authors: Kai Li Lim; Kah Phooi Seng; Lee Seng Yeong; Li-Minn Ang; Sue Inn Ch'ng

Addresses: School of Electrical, Electronic and Computer Engineering, The University of Western Australia, 35 Stirling Highway, Crawley WA 6009, Australia ' School of Computing and Mathematics, Charles Sturt University, Locked Bag 588, Wagga Wagga NSW 2678, Australia ' Department of Computing and Information Systems, Sunway University, 5 Jalan Universiti, Bandar Sunway, 47500 Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia ' School of Computing and Mathematics, Charles Sturt University, Locked Bag 588, Wagga Wagga NSW 2678, Australia ' Department of Computing and Information Systems, Sunway University, 5 Jalan Universiti, Bandar Sunway, 47500 Petaling Jaya, Selangor, Malaysia

Abstract: A navigation system using an Android mobile device for the visually impaired is explored in this paper. This paper focuses on pathfinding algorithms and their implementations on Java platform. The boundary iterative-deepening depth-first search (BIDDFS) pathfinding algorithm is extended for bidirectional searching. Fast pathfinding is applied for the BIDDFS by reducing memory read and writes cycles, proposing the optimised BIDDFS. Fast pathfinding is also extended for the bidirectional BIDDFS, proposing the fast bidirectional BIDDFS. The fast bidirectional BIDDFS uses Java's thread feature to implement a parallel structure. The optimised BIDDFS was able to record drastic improvements in pathfinding speeds compared to the standard BIDDFS. Likewise, the fast bidirectional BIDDFS recorded significant speed improvements over the parallel bidirectional BIDDFS.

Keywords: pathfinding; visually impaired; uninformed search; bidirectional search; visual impairment; navigation systems; Android; mobile devices; Java.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCCIA.2016.077467

International Journal of Computational Complexity and Intelligent Algorithms, 2016 Vol.1 No.1, pp.99 - 114

Received: 04 Sep 2014
Accepted: 17 May 2015
Published online: 02 Jul 2016 *