Seeing through Events: Real-Time Moving Object Sonification for Visually Impaired People Using Event-Based Camera

Scene sonification is a powerful technique to help Visually Impaired People (VIP) understand their surroundings. Existing methods usually perform sonification on the entire images of the surrounding scene acquired by a standard camera or on the priori static obstacles acquired by image processing algorithms on the RGB image of the surrounding scene. However, if all the information in the scene are delivered to VIP simultaneously, it will cause information redundancy. In fact, biological vision is more sensitive to moving objects in the scene than static objects, which is also the original intention of the event-based camera. In this paper, we propose a real-time sonification framework to help VIP understand the moving objects in the scene. First, we capture the events in the scene using an event-based camera and cluster them into multiple moving objects without relying on any prior knowledge. Then, sonification based on MIDI is enabled on these objects synchronously. Finally, we conduct comprehensive experiments on the scene video with sonification audio attended by 20 VIP and 20 Sighted People (SP). The results show that our method allows both participants to clearly distinguish the number, size, motion speed, and motion trajectories of multiple objects. The results show that our method is more comfortable to hear than existing methods in terms of aesthetics.