Visually Impaired Navigation Assistance

Latest papers

22 papers2 papers in the last four weeks, down 50% on the four weeks before. 0.0% of all new papers.

VISTA: A Multimodal Egocentric Benchmark for Goal-Oriented Perception and Assistance to Blind and Low-Vision Users
Oct 16, 2026Noé Mosca, Mohamed Rayan Barhdadi, Muhammad Hamza +11Assistive Technology for Blind and Low-Vision People Visually Impaired Navigation Assistance
Harvard AI and Robotics Lab, Harvard University · Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris · Texas A&M University +2
NavAble: A Large-Scale Dataset and Synthetic Data Generation Pipeline for Blind Navigation
Oct 14, 2026Hochul Hwang, Jahir Sadik Monon, Soowan Yang +9Visually Impaired Navigation Assistance Assistive Technology for Blind and Low-Vision People
University of Massachusetts Amherst · Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology · Boston University
Small yet Assistive: Spatially-Aware Post-Training for Low Vision
Sep 23, 2026Rishabh Choudhary, Shreyansh Raj, Umesh Goyal +6Vision-Language Models VLM Adaptation
Indian Institute of Technology Mandi · Mohamed bin Zayed University of Artificial Intelligence
Touvigation: Embodied Adaptive Object Acquisition for Blind and Low-Vision Users in Unfamiliar Indoor Environments
Sep 18, 2026George Xi Wang, Xiangyu Li, Shaoyue Wen +8Assistive Technology for Blind and Low-Vision People Visually Impaired Navigation Assistance
Stony Brook University, United States · New York University, United States · Brown University, United States +6
An Affordable AI-Integrated Smart Cane for Multimodal Mobility Assistance of Visually Impaired Users
Sep 12, 2026Ali Akarma, Adeel Ahmad, Toqeer Ali SyedVisually Impaired Navigation Assistance Assistive Robotics
AI Center, Faculty of Computer and Information Systems, Islamic University of Madinah, Madinah 42351, Saudi Arabia · AI V&V Lab, King Fahd University of Petroleum and Minerals, Dhahran 31261, Saudi Arabia
Assisted Spatial Cognition Through Vision-Language Models
Sep 11, 2026H. Riaz, J. B. Fernandez, I. Mills +3Visual Spatial Reasoning Assistive Technology for Blind and Low-Vision People
School of Electronic Engineering, Dublin City University, Dublin, Ireland · Insight Research Ireland Centre for Data Analytics, Dublin, Ireland · South East Technological University, Waterford, Ireland
Time-Aware Assistive Navigation
Sep 4, 2026Masaki Kuribayashi, Zhongkai Shangguan, Eshed Ohn-BarVisually Impaired Navigation Assistance Vision-Language Navigation
Waseda University · Boston University
ForeSightGuide: An Anticipatory Framework toward Accurate and Low-Redundancy Guidance for the Visually Impaired
Aug 19, 2026Zhiyuan Wang, Xu Li, Shikang Guo +3Visually Impaired Navigation Assistance Vision-Language Navigation
School of Information Engineering, Wuhan University of Technology 122 Luoshi Road, Wuhan 430070, China
Safety-oriented sidewalk and road segmentation for smartphone-based assistive navigation
Jul 23, 2026Hakan Calim, Anamaria Dumitrescu, Adarsh Bhandary Panambur +2Visual Navigation Visually Impaired Navigation Assistance
Pattern Recognition Lab, Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nuremberg, Erlangen, Germany · Department of Telecommunications, National University of Science and Technology “Politehnica” Bucharest, Romania
An Indoor Navigation System for the Visually Impaired based on UWB Positioning and D* Lite Path Planning Algorithm
Jul 18, 2026Thanh C. Vo, Dong LT. Tran, Huy HM. Le +4Indoor Robot Navigation Visually Impaired Navigation Assistance
Viện Công nghệ Kỹ thuật Hàng không Vũ trụ, Đại học Duy Tân, Đà Nẵng
VIABench: A Comprehensive Video Benchmark Collected from Blind Individuals for Visual Impairment Assistance
Jul 16, 2026Yunfeng Liu, Yuandong Yang, Jiarui Han +5VLM Evaluation Video Understanding
1Nanjing University · 2Shanghai AI Laboratory
VisionAId: An Offline-First Multimodal Android Assistant for People with Visual Impairment, Featuring Personalized Object Retrieval
Jul 2, 2026Cristian-Gabriel Florea, Stelian SpînuAssistive Technology for Blind and Low-Vision People Visually Impaired Navigation Assistance
The Military Technical Academy “Ferdinand I”, Bucharest, Romania
A Visually Impaired Assistance Benchmark for VLM-as-a-Judge Evaluation
May 29, 2026Yi Zhao, Siqi Wang, Zhe Hu +2VLM Evaluation LLM-as-a-Judge
Department of Computing, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University
CANINE: Coaching Visually Impaired Users for Interactive Navigation with a Robot Guide Dog
May 19, 2026Cunjun Yu, Zishuo Wang, Anxing Xiao +2Assistive Robotics Human-Robot Interaction
School of Computing, 2Smart Systems Institute National University of Singapore
Urban Risk-Aware Navigation via VQA-Based Event Maps for People with Low Vision
May 12, 2026Antoni Valls, Jordi Sanchez-RieraVisual Question Answering Vision-Language Models
Institut de Rob`otica i Inform`atica Industrial, CSIC-UPC, Llorens i Artigas 4-6, 08028 Barcelona, Spain
LLM-Guided Agentic Floor Plan Parsing for Accessible Indoor Navigation of Blind and Low-Vision People
Apr 27, 2026Aydin Ayanzadeh, Tim OatesLLM Agent Planning Visually Impaired Navigation Assistance
University of Maryland, Baltimore County
AMAVA: Adaptive Motion-Aware Video-to-Audio Framework for Visually-Impaired Assistance
Apr 26, 2026Benjamin Klein, Kazi Ruslan Rahman, Sanchita GhoseText-to-Audio Generation Visually Impaired Navigation Assistance
Department of Computer Science, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA · Department of Mathematics, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA · Department of Computer Engineering, San Francisco State University, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA
Navigation beyond Wayfinding: Robots Collaborating with Visually Impaired Users for Environmental Interactions
Mar 15, 2026Shaojun Cai, Nuwan Janaka, Ashwin Ram +4Visually Impaired Navigation Assistance Assistive Robotics
National University of Singapore Singapore Singapore · City University of Hong Kong Hong Kong China · Saarland University Saarbrücken Germany +3
Understanding the Use of a Large Language Model-Powered Guide to Make Virtual Reality Accessible for Blind and Low Vision People
Mar 10, 2026Jazmin Collins, Sharon Y Lin, Tianqi Liu +2Assistive Technology for Blind and Low-Vision People Visually Impaired Navigation Assistance
Cornell University New York, New York, USA · Cornell Tech New York, New York, USA · Cornell University Ithaca, New York, USA
GuideTWSI: A Diverse Tactile Walking Surface Indicator Dataset from Synthetic and Real-World Images for Blind and Low-Vision Navigation
Mar 7, 2026Hochul Hwang, Soowan Yang, Anh N. H. Nguyen +6Visually Impaired Navigation Assistance Assistive Technology for Blind and Low-Vision People
University of Massachusetts Amherst · Daegu Gyeongbuk Institute of Science and Technology · The University of Texas at Austin +2
Trajectory Generation with Endpoint Regulation and Momentum-Aware Dynamics for Visually Impaired Scenarios
Feb 25, 2026Yuting Zeng, Manping Fan, You Zhou +5Visually Impaired Navigation Assistance Trajectory Generation
School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610054, Sichuan, P.R. China. · School of Medicine, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan, China. · Sichuan Provincial Key Laboratory for Human Disease Gene Study, Sichuan Academy of Medical Sciences & Sichuan Provincial People’s Hospital, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan, China.
Adaptive Multi-Scale Channel-Spatial Attention Aggregation Framework for 3D Indoor Semantic Scene Completion Toward Assisting Visually Impaired
Feb 18, 2026Qi He, XiangXiang Wang, Jingtao Zhang +5Visually Impaired Navigation Assistance 3D Scene Completion
School of Information and Software Engineering, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan, China. · Sichuan Provincial Key Laboratory for Human Disease Gene Study, Sichuan Academy of Medical Sciences & Sichuan Provincial People’s Hospital, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu, Sichuan, China. · Tibetan Language Intelligence National Key Laboratory, Qinghai Normal University, Xining, Qinghai, China. +2

Oct 16, 2026J/K move · Enter open · S save

VISTA: A Multimodal Egocentric Benchmark for Goal-Oriented Perception and Assistance to Blind and Low-Vision Users

Noé Mosca, Mohamed Rayan Barhdadi, Muhammad Hamza, Joshua Yeh+10

Harvard AI and Robotics Lab, Harvard University · Télécom Paris, Institut Polytechnique de Paris · Texas A&M University+2

Assistive Technology for Blind and Low-Vision People Visually Impaired Navigation Assistance Multimodal Model Evaluation Multimodal Understanding

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Blindness and low vision limit many people's ability to complete daily tasks, motivating AI assistants that provide useful guidance. Yet, existing benchmarks do not adequately test whether vision models can provide effective everyday assistance. In particular, i) existing benchmarks primarily rely on visual and textual inputs, with limited support for other modalities that are increasingly available in egocentric wearable devices such as gaze, inertial measurements, spatial trajectories, and others; and ii) existing evaluations emphasize scene understanding and question answering, with limited coverage of goal-conditioned guidance for blind and low-vision users across everyday tasks. To bridge this gap, we introduce VISTA (Visually Impaired Scene and Task Annotations), a multimodal egocentric benchmark for goal-oriented assistance for blind and low-vision users. VISTA contains

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1,000 egocentric recordings captured with Project Aria glasses; each recording provides synchronized sensor streams, six of which serve as model inputs, and three different types of annotation, covering ten task categories (TC), from object localization to hazard detection. We evaluate 14 representative vision-language models zero-shot on VISTA and design a lightweight multimodal model baseline that integrates all six modalities. Experimental results show that, although existing models can often describe egocentric scenes, they remain limited in generating goal-directed assistive guidance. VISTA thus provides a benchmark for evaluating multimodal models that could improve everyday accessibility.