An Artificial Intelligence-based Assistant for the Visually Impaired

This paper describes an artificial intelligence-based assistant application, AIDEN, developed during 2023 and 2024, aimed at improving the quality of life for visually impaired individuals. Visually impaired individuals face challenges in identifying objects, reading text, and navigating unfamiliar environments, which can limit their independence and reduce their quality of life. Although solutions such as Braille, audio books, and screen readers exist, they may not be effective in all situations. This application leverages state-of-the-art machine learning algorithms to identify and describe objects, read text, and answer questions about the environment. Specifically, it uses You Only Look Once architectures and a Large Language and Vision Assistant. The system incorporates several methods to facilitate the user's interaction with the system and access to textual and visual information in an appropriate manner. AIDEN aims to enhance user autonomy and access to information, contributing to an improved perception of daily usability, as supported by user feedback.

CHIRLA: Comprehensive High-resolution Identification and Re-identification for Large-scale Analysis

Person re-identification (Re-ID) is a key challenge in computer vision, requiring the matching of individuals across different cameras, locations, and time periods. While most research focuses on short-term scenarios with minimal appearance changes, real-world applications demand robust Re-ID systems capable of handling long-term scenarios, where persons' appearances can change significantly due to variations in clothing and physical characteristics. In this paper, we present CHIRLA, Comprehensive High-resolution Identification and Re-identification for Large-scale Analysis, a novel dataset specifically designed for long-term person Re-ID. CHIRLA consists of recordings from strategically placed cameras over a seven-month period, capturing significant variations in both temporal and appearance attributes, including controlled changes in participants' clothing and physical features. The dataset includes 22 individuals, four connected indoor environments, and seven cameras. We collected more than five hours of video that we semi-automatically labeled to generate around one million bounding boxes with identity annotations. By introducing this comprehensive benchmark, we aim to facilitate the development and evaluation of Re-ID algorithms that can reliably perform in challenging, long-term real-world scenarios.