research-article

An Assisted Photography Framework to Help Visually Impaired Users Properly Aim a Camera

Authors:

Marynel Vázquez,

Aaron SteinfeldAuthors Info & Claims

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction (TOCHI), Volume 21, Issue 5

Article No.: 25, Pages 1 - 29

https://doi.org/10.1145/2651380

Published: 21 November 2014 Publication History

Abstract

We propose an assisted photography framework to help visually impaired users properly aim a camera and evaluate our implementation in the context of documenting public transportation accessibility. Our framework integrates user interaction during the image capturing process to help users take better pictures in real time. We use an image composition model to evaluate picture quality and suggest providing audiovisual feedback to improve users’ aiming position. With our particular framework implementation, blind participants were able to take pictures of similar quality to those taken by low vision participants without assistance. Likewise, our system helped low vision participants take pictures as good as those taken by fully sighted users. Our results also show a positive trend in favor of spoken directions to assist visually impaired users in comparison to tone and silent feedback. Positive usefulness ratings provided by full vision users further suggest that assisted photography has universal appeal.

Supplementary Material

a25-vazquez-apndx.pdf (vazquez.zip)

Supplemental movie, appendix, image and software files for, An Assisted Photography Framework to Help Visually Impaired Users Properly Aim a Camera

Download
539.72 KB

References

[1]

Radhakrishna Achanta, Sheila Hemami, Francisco Estrada, and Sabine Susstrunk. 2009. Frequency-tuned salient region detection. In Proceedings of the 2009 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR’09). IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA, 1597--1604.

[2]

Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir. 2007. Seam carving for content-aware image resizing. ACM Transactions on Graphics 26, 3, Article No. 10.

Digital Library

[3]

Soonmin Bae, Aseem Agarwala, and Frédo Durand. 2010. Computational rephotography. ACM Transactions on Graphics 29, 3, 1--15.

Digital Library

[4]

Simon Baker and Iain Matthews. 2004. Lucas-Kanade 20 years on: A unifying framework. International Journal of Computer Vision 56, 3, 221--255.

Digital Library

[5]

Serene Banerjee and Brian L. Evans. 2007. In-camera automation of photographic composition rules. IEEE Transactions on Image Processing 16, 7, 1807--1820.

Digital Library

[6]

Scott Beach, Richard Schulz, Julie Downs, Judith Matthews, Bruce Barron, and Katherine Seelman. 2009. Disability, age, and informational privacy attitudes in quality of life technology applications: Results from a national Web survey. ACM Transactions on Accessible Computing 2, 1, 5.

Digital Library

[7]

Nahom Beyene, Rory Cooper, and Aaron Steinfeld. 2009. Driving status and the inner drive for community mobility and participation: A survey of people with disabilities and senior citizens from support groups in New Delhi, India. In Proceedings of the Rehabilitation Engineering and Assistive Technology Society of North America (RESNA) Conference.

[8]

Peng Bian and Liming Zhang. 2008. Biological plausibility of spectral domain approach for spatiotemporal visual saliency. In Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Advances in Neuro-Information Processing (ICONIP’08), Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 251--258.

Digital Library

[9]

Jeffrey P. Bigham, Chandrika Jayant, Hanjie Ji, Greg Little, Andrew Miller, Robert C. Miller, Robin Miller, Aubrey Tatarowicz, Brandyn White, Samual White, and Tom Yeh. 2010a. VizWiz: Nearly real-time answers to visual questions. In Proceedings of the 23nd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST’10). ACM, New York, NY, 333--342.

Digital Library

[10]

Jeffrey P. Bigham, Chandrika Jayant, Andrew Miller, Brandyn White, and Tom Yeh. 2010b. VizWiz:: LocateIt—enabling blind people to locate objects in their environment. In Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition Workshops (CVPRW). IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA, 65--72.

[11]

Klaus Bohn. 2006. 50 Principles of Composition in Photography: A Practical Guide to Seeing Photographically through the Eyes of a Master Photographer. CCB Publishing.

[12]

Ralph Brunner, Nikhil Bhogal, and James David Batson. 2012. Image Capturing Device Having Continuous Image Capture. Patent Publication No. US8289400 B2: Filed June 5, 2009, Published Oct. 16, 2012. Retrieved September 14, 2014, from http://www.google.com/patents/US8289400.

[13]

Michele A. Burton, Erin Brady, Robin Brewer, Callie Neylan, Jeffrey P. Bigham, and Amy Hurst. 2012. Crowdsourcing subjective fashion advice using VizWiz: Challenges and opportunities. In Proceedings of the 14th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS’12). ACM, New York, NY, 135--142.

Digital Library

[14]

Liqun Chen, Xing Xie, Xin Fan, Wei-Ying Ma, Hong-Jiang Zhang, and Heqin Zhou. 2002. A Visual Attention Model for Adapting Images on Small Displays. Technical Report MSR-TR-2002-125. Microsoft Research.

[15]

Frederique Crete, Thierry Dolmiere, Patricia Ladret, and Marina Nicolas. 2007. The blur effect: Perception and estimation with a new no-reference perceptual blur metric. In Proceedings of SPIE, Vol. 6492. Human Vision and Electronic Imaging XII. 64920I--64920I--11.

[16]

Ritendra Datta, Dhiraj Joshi, Jia Li, and James Z. Wang. 2006. Studying aesthetics in photographic images using a computational approach. In Computer Vision—ECCV 2006. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, Vol. 3953. Springer, 288--301.

Digital Library

[17]

David Präkel. 2006. Basics Photography 01: Composition. AVA Publishing.

[18]

Mark Desnoyer and David Wettergreen. 2010. Aesthetic image classification for autonomous agents. In Proceedings of the 20th International Conference on Pattern Recognition (ICPR’10). IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA, 3452--3455.

Digital Library

[19]

Benoit Deville, Guido Bologna, Michel Vinckenbosch, and Thierry Pun. 2008. Guiding the focus of attention of blind people with visual saliency. In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computer Vision Applications for the Visually Impaired (CVAVI’08). 1--13.

[20]

Michael Dixon, Cindy M. Grimm, and William D. Smart. 2003. Picture Composition for a Robot Photographer. Technical Report WUCSE-2003-52. Washington University in St. Louis, St. Louis, MO.

[21]

Simone Frintrop, Erich Rome, and Henrik I. Christensen. 2010. Computational visual attention systems and their cognitive foundations: A survey. ACM Transactions on Applied Perception 7, 1, 1--39.

Digital Library

[22]

Bruce Gooch, Erik Reinhard, Chris Moulding, and Peter Shirley. 2001. Artistic composition for image creation. In Proceedings of the 12th Eurographics Workshop on Rendering Techniques. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 83--88.

Digital Library

[23]

Chenlei Guo, Qi Ma, and Liming Zhang. 2008. Spatio-temporal saliency detection using phase spectrum of quaternion Fourier transform. In Proceedings of the 2008 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR’08). IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA, 1--8.

[24]

Xiaodi Hou and Liqing Zhang. 2007. Saliency detection: A spectral residual approach. In Proceedings of the 2007 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR’07). IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA, 1--8.

[25]

Andreas Hub, Joachim Diepstraten, and Thomas Ertl. 2004. Design and development of an indoor navigation and object identification system for the blind. In Proceedings of the 6th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS’04). ACM, New York, NY, 147--152.

Digital Library

[26]

Laurent Itti and Christof Koch. 2001. Computational modelling of visual attention. Nature Reviews Neuroscience 2, 3, 194--203.

[27]

Bryan James, Andrew Hodge, and Aram Lindahl. 2010. Camera Image Selection Based on Detected Device Movement. Patent Publication No. US20100309334 A1: Filed June 5, 2009, Published Dec. 9, 2010. Retrieved September 14, 2014, from http://www.google.com/patents/US20100309334.

[28]

Chandrika Jayant. 2010. MobileAccessibility: Camera focalization for blind and low-vision users on the go. SIGACCESS Accessible Computing 96, 37--40.

Digital Library

[29]

Chandrika Jayant, Hanjie Ji, Samuel White, and Jeffrey P. Bigham. 2011. Supporting blind photography. In Proceedings of the 13th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS’11). ACM, New York, NY, 203--210.

Digital Library

[30]

Julia Schwarz. 2011. Headshot. Retrieved September 14, 2014, from http://juliaschwarz.net/appsandutilities/2012/05/04/headshot/.

[31]

Myung-Jin Kim, Tae-Hoon Song, Seung-Hun Jin, Soon Mook Jung, Gi-Hoon Go, Key-Ho Kwon, and Jae-Wook Jeon. 2010. Automatically available photographer robot for controlling composition and taking pictures. In Proceedings of the 2010 IEEE/RSJ International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS’10). IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA, 6010--6015.

[32]

Aliasgar Kutiyanawala, Vladimir Kulyukin, and John Nicholson. 2011. Teleassistance in accessible shopping for the blind. In Proceedings of the 2011 International Conference on Internet Computing. 18--21.

[33]

Xu Liu. 2008. A camera phone based currency reader for the visually impaired. In Proceedings of the 10th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility (ASSETS’08). ACM, New York, NY, 305--306.

Digital Library

[34]

Jiebo Luo, Amit Singhal, and Andreas Savakis. 2003. Efficient mobile imaging using emphasis image selection. In Proceedings of the PICS Conference. Society for Imaging Science and Technology, Springfield, VA, 355--359.

[35]

H. D. Patterson and R. Thompson. 1975. Maximum likelihood estimation of components of variance. In Proceedings of the 8th International Biometric Conference. 199--207.

[36]

Aaron Steinfeld, Rafae Dar Aziz, Lauren Von Dehsen, Sun Young Park, Jordana L. Maisel, and Edward Steinfeld. 2010a. Modality preference for rider reports on transit accessibility problems. In Proceedings of the TRB 2010 Annual Meeting. Transportation Research Board, Washington, DC.

[37]

Aaron Steinfeld, Rafae Dar Aziz, Lauren Von Dehsen, Sun Young Park, Jordana L. Maisel, and Edward Steinfeld. 2010b. The value and acceptance of citizen science to promote transit accessibility. Technology and Disability 22, 1--2, 73--81.

[38]

Walter W. Stroup. 2012. Generalized Linear Mixed Models: Modern Concepts, Methods and Applications. Taylor & Francis.

[39]

Bongwon Suh, Haibin Ling, Benjamin B. Bederson, and David W. Jacobs. 2003. Automatic thumbnail cropping and its effectiveness. In Proceedings of the 16th Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST’03). ACM, New York, NY, 95--104.

Digital Library

[40]

Hachon Sung, Guntae Bae, Sunyoung Cho, and Hyeran Byun. 2012. Interactive optimization of photo composition with Gaussian mixture model on mobile platform. Optical Engineering 51, 1, 017001.

[41]

Ender Tekin and James M. Coughlan. 2010. A mobile phone application enabling visually impaired users to find and read product barcodes. In Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Computers Helping People with Special Needs (ICCHP’10). Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg, 290--295.

Digital Library

[42]

Marynel Vázquez and Aaron Steinfeld. 2011a. An assisted photography method for street scenes. In Proceedings of the 2011 IEEE Workshop on Applications of Computer Vision (WACV’11). IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA, 89--94.

Digital Library

[43]

Marynel Vázquez and Aaron Steinfeld. 2011b. Facilitating photographic documentation of accessibility in street scenes. In CHI’11 Extended Abstracts on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI EA’11). ACM, New York, NY, 1711--1716.

Digital Library

[44]

Marynel Vázquez and Aaron Steinfeld. 2012. Helping visually impaired users properly aim a camera. In Proceedings of the 14th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility(ASSETS’12). ACM, New York, NY, 95--102.

Digital Library

[45]

Paul Viola and Michael Jones. 2001. Rapid object detection using a boosted cascade of simple features. In Proceedings of the 2001 IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR’01), Vol. 1. IEEE, Los Alamitos, CA, I-511--I-518.

[46]

Dirk Walther and Christof Koch. 2006. Modeling attention to salient proto-objects. Neural Networks 19, 9, 1395--1407.

Digital Library

[47]

Samuel White, Hanjie Ji, and Jeffrey P. Bigham. 2010. EasySnap: Real-time audio feedback for blind photography. In Adjunct Proceedings of the 23nd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology (UIST’10). ACM, New York, NY, 409--410.

Digital Library

Cited By

Agrawal SNayak SNaik AHayes BAgmon NAn BRicci AYeoh W(2023)ShelfHelp: Empowering Humans to Perform Vision-Independent Manipulation Tasks with a Socially Assistive Robotic CaneProceedings of the 2023 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems10.5555/3545946.3598805(1514-1523)Online publication date: 30-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3545946.3598805
Hirabayashi NIwamura MCheng ZMinatani KKise K(2023)VisPhoto: Photography for People with Visual Impairments via Post-Production of Omnidirectional Camera ImagingProceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3597638.3608422(1-17)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597638.3608422
Sharma TStangl AZhang LTseng YXu IFindlater LGurari DWang Y(2023)Disability-First Design and Creation of A Dataset Showing Private Visual Information Collected With People Who Are BlindProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580922(1-15)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3580922
Show More Cited By

Index Terms

An Assisted Photography Framework to Help Visually Impaired Users Properly Aim a Camera
1. Human-centered computing
  1. Human computer interaction (HCI)
    1. Interaction devices
      1. Touch screens
    2. Interaction paradigms

Recommendations

Helping visually impaired users properly aim a camera
ASSETS '12: Proceedings of the 14th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility

We evaluate three interaction modes to assist visually impaired users during the camera aiming process: speech, tone, and silent feedback. Our main assumption is that users are able to spatially localize what they want to photograph, and roughly aim the ...
Skim-reading Strategies in Sighted and Visually-Impaired Individuals: A Comparative Study
PETRA '18: Proceedings of the 11th PErvasive Technologies Related to Assistive Environments Conference

As the amount of readily available reading material increases, the ability to read selectively, or to skim-read, is becoming an important skill. In this paper, we report a comparative study of existing skim-reading strategies in sighted and visually ...
FindMyWay: Toward Developing an Accessible Wayfinding Application for Visually Impaired in an Indoor Space
Computers Helping People with Special Needs
Abstract
Due to the limitations of satellite-based navigation systems, such as GPS, indoor wayfinding has been very challenging for people with disabilities. Unfamiliarity and infrastructure complexity in an indoor space could put an additional burden on ...

Comments

Information & Contributors

Information

Published In

cover image ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction

ACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction Volume 21, Issue 5

November 2014

120 pages

ISSN:1073-0516

EISSN:1557-7325

DOI:10.1145/2692163

Editor:
Shumin Zhai
Google

Issue’s Table of Contents

Copyright © 2014 ACM.

Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected].

Publisher

Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 21 November 2014

Accepted: 01 July 2014

Revised: 01 July 2014

Received: 01 June 2013

Published in TOCHI Volume 21, Issue 5

Permissions

Request permissions for this article.

Request Permissions

Check for updates

Author Tags

Qualifiers

Research-article
Research
Refereed

Funding Sources

National Institute on Disability and Rehabilitation Research

Contributors

Other Metrics

View Article Metrics

Bibliometrics & Citations

Bibliometrics

Article Metrics

33
Total Citations
View Citations
723
Total Downloads

Downloads (Last 12 months)40
Downloads (Last 6 weeks)3

Reflects downloads up to 09 Aug 2024

Other Metrics

View Author Metrics

Citations

Cited By

Agrawal SNayak SNaik AHayes BAgmon NAn BRicci AYeoh W(2023)ShelfHelp: Empowering Humans to Perform Vision-Independent Manipulation Tasks with a Socially Assistive Robotic CaneProceedings of the 2023 International Conference on Autonomous Agents and Multiagent Systems10.5555/3545946.3598805(1514-1523)Online publication date: 30-May-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.5555/3545946.3598805
Hirabayashi NIwamura MCheng ZMinatani KKise K(2023)VisPhoto: Photography for People with Visual Impairments via Post-Production of Omnidirectional Camera ImagingProceedings of the 25th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3597638.3608422(1-17)Online publication date: 22-Oct-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3597638.3608422
Sharma TStangl AZhang LTseng YXu IFindlater LGurari DWang Y(2023)Disability-First Design and Creation of A Dataset Showing Private Visual Information Collected With People Who Are BlindProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580922(1-15)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3544548.3580922
Mandal MGhadiyaram DGurari DBovik A(2023)Helping Visually Impaired People Take Better Quality PicturesIEEE Transactions on Image Processing10.1109/TIP.2023.328206732(3873-3884)Online publication date: 1-Jan-2023
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/TIP.2023.3282067
Huang LWestin TEladhari MMagnússon SChen H(2023)Eyes can draw: A high-fidelity free-eye drawing method with unimodal gaze controlInternational Journal of Human-Computer Studies10.1016/j.ijhcs.2022.102966170(102966)Online publication date: Feb-2023
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijhcs.2022.102966
Gonzalez Penuela RVermette PYan ZZhang CVertanen KAzenkot S(2022)Understanding How People with Visual Impairments Take Selfies: Experiences and ChallengesProceedings of the 24th International ACM SIGACCESS Conference on Computers and Accessibility10.1145/3517428.3550372(1-4)Online publication date: 23-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3517428.3550372
Reyes-Cruz GFischer JReeves S(2022)Demonstrating Interaction: The Case of Assistive TechnologyACM Transactions on Computer-Human Interaction10.1145/351423629:5(1-37)Online publication date: 20-Oct-2022
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3514236
Chatterjee ISteinfeld A(2021)Performance of a low-cost, human-inspired perception approach for dense moving crowd navigation2016 25th IEEE International Symposium on Robot and Human Interactive Communication (RO-MAN)10.1109/ROMAN.2016.7745176(578-585)Online publication date: 11-Mar-2021
https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1109/ROMAN.2016.7745176
Chung SLee KPark SOh U(2021)Three-dimensional Nonvisual Directional Guidance for People with Visual Impairments2021 IEEE International Conference on Pervasive Computing and Communications Workshops and other Affiliated Events (PerCom Workshops)10.1109/PerComWorkshops51409.2021.9431084(81-86)Online publication date: 22-Mar-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/PerComWorkshops51409.2021.9431084
Chung SLee KOh U(2021)Understanding the Two-Step Nonvisual Omnidirectional Guidance for Target Acquisition in 3D Spaces2021 IEEE International Symposium on Mixed and Augmented Reality (ISMAR)10.1109/ISMAR52148.2021.00050(339-346)Online publication date: Oct-2021
https://doi.org/10.1109/ISMAR52148.2021.00050
Show More Cited By

View Options

Get Access

Login options

Check if you have access through your login credentials or your institution to get full access on this article.

Full Access

Get this Article

View options

PDF

View or Download as a PDF file.

eReader

View online with eReader.

Media

Figures

Other

Tables

View Issue’s Table of Contents