Optical Fiber Pavement Blind Guiding Method Based on Distributed Optical Fiber Vibration Sensing

Nowadays, blind guiding service is highly required by visually impaired people for a normal outdoor life. However, the tactile pavements fail to work for blind guiding when they are covered or blocked, and even become barriers for normal people who are riding bicycles, sliding the trolley cases and so on. Recently, distributed optical fiber vibration sensing (DOFVS) is widely used for electric fence and human activity recognition. In this paper, to our best knowledge, we first propose the optical fiber pavement to replace the tactile pavement for outdoor blind guiding, and provide the positioning method based on phase-sensitive optical time domain reflectometer (
$\Phi$
-OTDR). By extracting critical gait features from the output intensity signal, we succeed to make accurate classification between the blind pedestrians and the normal ones. Based on signal autocorrelation analysis in both time and space domains, the locations of each target person on the optical fiber pavement are accurately estimated. The experiment results show that our proposed method achieves highly accurate recognition of blind pedestrians and provides their localization estimations accurately.