The moment has finally arrived.

Blind Assistant core CFW0002 is online on Visilab website:

http://visilab.unime.it/~filippo/Bli...dAssistant.htm

Blind Assistant is an attempt to help blind men, using
softwares that run not on expensive and complex
hardware, but on a simple Sony PSP.

The new core uses Nanodesktop 0.3.4 (the next version
of ND that will be released very soon).

The changes are very important.

a) Blind Assistant has a new algorithm for face recognition.
It has been hardly optimized for using Sony VFPU coprocessor.
The speed is very high and recognition rate has been
improved.

b) Voice Synthetizer also uses VFPU . This allows to the
software a generation of vocal samples in real time.

c) Now, Blind Assistant is able also to recognize in which
room the blind is. This task is done through a client/server
architecture, that uses a new component called
BlindServer.

BlindServer is a complex program, designed to runs on a X86 PC.

It is distribuited in 3 versions: one for
normal MMX CPU, one for SSE CPU and one for SSE2/SSE3 CPU.

When Blind Assistant needs the execution of a complex
algorithm, that should require a great cpu power, it sends
an information packet via wi-fi to the Blind Server.

If BlindServer runs on a INTEL or AMD CPU in that moment,
it can execute also heavy computations as SIFT, without
large delays.

Blind Server executes the operation, making use of a fast
Intel or AMD CPU and, when the test has been completed, it
returns via wi-fi the results to the Blind Assistant client,
that runs on the PSP.

In this way, the mobile client (i.e. the PSP), can execute
operations that would be impossible for a simple MIPS CPU.

The communication between the client and the server, is
realized using BAWCP (Blind Assistant wireless communication
protocol): a wi-fi protocol that manages the exchange of
commands between the client side and the server side, and
that manages also the process of compression and decompression
of the images.

Through the BlindServer, the homebrew on the PSP can execute
the SIFT algorithm. SIFT stands for Scalar Invariant Feature
Transform: it allows the recognition of a particular place
or room of a home. This can help the blind, because he can
know in which room he is actually.


d) Blind Assistant CFW0002 supports also a complex system
for optical char recognition. The system is able to read
a text or a label, through the Sony Go-Cam.

This can be done using a combination of a OCR method and of
the ndFLite Voice Synthetizer (now very faster, thanks to the
new routines VFPU-optimized).

The defined OCR methods are two: the former uses the known
Tesseract OCR. Tesseract is a technology developed by HP in 1995,
and in a second time released as open-source. It is
actually supported by the Google Foundation.

The second OCR method uses Nanodesktop OCRAD, and it is designed
to run in a fully mobile situation (i.e. when the client hasn't
a connection with a BlindServer available).

The system includes also an algorithm that, using a set of
dictionaries, is able to correct the errata words that
have been detected by the OCR.

In ideal condition, Blind Assistant OCR reaches a recognition
rate of 90%.


In the package you can find a PDF called Install Blind Assistant.
It contains all the needed informations about the program.

The program is able to autoupdate via internet when new updates
are released.

The users that have installed the previous core CFW0001, can
update the core manually: go to Update menu in the main
interface, and choose the item "Check, DwLoad and Install
new updates". The core CFW0001 will be updated itself
automatically.

The service of autoupdate will become operative within some hours
from this moment.


Thanks for the attention
Filippo Battaglia ...