VisPercep: A Vision-Language Approach to Enhance Visual Perception for
  People with Blindness and Low Vision
Yu Hao Fan Yang Hao Huang Shuaihang Yuan Sundeep Rangan John-Ross Rizzo Yao Wang Yi Fang
People with blindness and low vision (pBLV) encounter substantial challenges
when it comes to comprehensive scene recognition and precise object
identification in unfamiliar environments. Additionally, due to the vision
loss, pBLV have difficulty in accessing and identifying potential tripping
hazards on their own. In this paper, we present a pioneering approach that
leverages a large vision-language model to enhance visual perception for pBLV,
offering detailed and comprehensive descriptions of the surrounding
environments and providing warnings about the potential risks. Our method
begins by leveraging a large image tagging model (i.e., Recognize Anything
(RAM)) to identify all common objects present in the captured images. The
recognition results and user query are then integrated into a prompt, tailored
specifically for pBLV using prompt engineering. By combining the prompt and
input image, a large vision-language model (i.e., InstructBLIP) generates
detailed and comprehensive descriptions of the environment and identifies
potential risks in the environment by analyzing the environmental objects and
scenes, relevant to the prompt. We evaluate our approach through experiments
conducted on both indoor and outdoor datasets. Our results demonstrate that our
method is able to recognize objects accurately and provide insightful
descriptions and analysis of the environment for pBLV.