Deep Learning Based Shopping Assistant For The Visually Impaired

Contemporary developments in computer vision and artificial intelligence show promise to greatly improve the lives of those with disabilities. In this paper, we propose one such development: a wearable object recognition device in the form of eyewear. Our device is specialized to recognize items from the produce section of a grocery store, but serves as a proof of concept for any similar object recognition wearable. It is user friendly, featuring buttons that are pressed to capture images with the built-in camera. A convolutional neural network (CNN) is used to train the object recognition system. After the object is recognized, a text-to-speech system is utilized to inform the user which object they are holding in addition to the price of the product. With accuracy rates of 99.35%, our product has proven to successfully identify objects with greater correctness than existing models.