• Journal of the Korean Society of School Health
• /
• v.10 no.1
• /
• pp.75-86
• /
• 1997

Blindness or visually handicaps are found to be an important factor destroying lifestyles as well as a physical problem. According to the data of handicapped person's(v.h.p) registered in Korea, the number of v.h.p. has not decreased. Especially, visual handicapped adolescents (v.h.a.) suffer from an insufficiency of social support under the current education system. There is a special education system for v.h.a. in Korea, and, as a result v.h.a.'s are educated separately from general students and communites. Compared with the self-conception of general students, v.h.a.'s have a more negative self-conception. Among former studies 51.7% of v.h.p's are not in good health. This, of course, means that their handicap impacts on other health problems. The first purpose of this study is to find out the causes of disease and the degree of social support, self-esteem, health management behavior provided and then to analyze the effect of self-esteem and social support on their behavior. To accomplish these purposes, visually handicapped the middle and high school students in Seoul city and Kyung-gi province were selected and 300 students sampled. The main results are as follows : 1) The highest specific handicap is impaired lenses (19.7%). 2. There were high correlations between health management behavior, self-esteem, and social support. 3. Social support is a more important variable than self-esteem on health management behavior. 4. Age of entry and length of stay in their special dormitories, and teacher's support account for 16% of psychological health management behavior 5. Age of entry in their special dormitory and total degree of social support account for 12% of preventive health behavior.

• Journal of the HCI Society of Korea
• /
• v.8 no.2
• /
• pp.1-8
• /
• 2013

In previous study, we developed a guidance system outdoors for person with visual impairment to be able to walk safely to the destination. The volunteers are exposed to dangerous situations since they are performed to the experiments in the outdoors. In order to solve the problem, we propose an interactive application that monitors the volunteer wearing guidance system and warns remotely the volunteer about dangerous situations. The application is used to remote wireless communication with guidance system through Bluetooth module that is built in a laptop computer, without additional device. Therefore, we can monitor in real time user's location and guided contents to user, and it is possible to check a path to the destination and POI (Point of Interest) coordinate values. As using a proposed monitoring application, it is possible to perform safe experiment with the rapid situation awareness and fast detection of dangerous.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Landscape Architecture
• /
• v.23 no.4
• /
• pp.81-96
• /
• 1996

The idea I set my thesis upon was to develop a methodology for the visually impaired to perceive an environment through their other senses. Since the Blind perceive spatial relationships by combined association of their other senses, it was essential to create a setting where their senses can be amplified. Thus this garden was designed to accommodate two or more of blind person's senses at once to provide more of '3-D' spatial relationship. The main goals of this thesis are, first, to create a place where the Blind can enjoy and nurture their own specific interests. Second, to reveal the nature in its allowing individual analysis and interpretation of a garden. Third, to move away from the prejudice of gardens for the Blind being made of only touching and smelling. To achieve these goals, the most important task was to establish a sense of space. In order to do so, five principles were used; Perspective, Enclosure, Light/Shade, Form, and Environment. After all, the garden for the Blind does not proclaim its purpose in loud terms nor in obvious manner. It should attempt to provide joy, serenity, and activity; a freedom to choose, recognize and analyze nuances of garden, the rhythm of enclosure and openness to experience variety, also to delight in subtle changes and to just imagine.

• The Journal of the Korea institute of electronic communication sciences
• /
• v.12 no.4
• /
• pp.691-700
• /
• 2017

This paper describes the design and implementation of automatic braille converter based on image processing for a person who is visually impaired. The conversion algorithm based on the image processing converts the input image obtained by the web-cam to binary image, and then calculates the cross-correlation with the stored character pattern image by labeling the character area and converts the character pattern image into the corresponding braille. The computer simulations showed that the proposed algorithm showed 95% and 91% conversion success rates for numerals and alphabets printed on A5 paper. The prototype test implemented by the servo motor using Arduino confirmed 89%, conversion performance. Therefore, we confirmed the feasibility of the automatic braille transducer.

• Journal of Digital Convergence
• /
• v.12 no.11
• /
• pp.349-355
• /
• 2014

In this paper, we propose the artificial vision system using human visual information processing and wavelet. Artificial vision system may be used for the visually impaired person and the machine recognition system. In this paper, we have constructed the information compression process to ganglion cells from the human retina. And we have reconstructed the primary visual information using recovery process to primary visual cortex from ganglion. Primary visual information is constructed by wavelet transformation using a high frequency and low frequency response. In the experiment, we used the faces database of AT&T. And the proposed method was able to improve the accuracy of face recognition considerably. And it was verified through experiments.

• The KIPS Transactions:PartB
• /
• v.19B no.4
• /
• pp.209-220
• /
• 2012

In this paper, we propose an adaptive pavement region detection method that is robust to changes of structural patterns in a natural scene. In order to segment out a pavement reliably, we propose two step approaches. We first detect the borderline of a pavement and separate out the candidate region of a pavement using VRays. The VRays are straight lines starting from a vanishing point. They split out the candidate region that includes the pavement in a radial shape. Once the candidate region is found, we next employ the adaptive multi-seed region growing(A-MSRG) method within the candidate region. The A-MSRG method segments out the pavement region very accurately by growing seed regions. The number of seed regions are to be determined adaptively depending on the encountered situation. We prove the effectiveness of our approach by comparing its performance against the performances of seed region growing(SRG) approach and multi-seed region growing(MSRG) approach in terms of the false detection rate.

• Journal of Korean Library and Information Science Society
• /
• v.51 no.3
• /
• pp.1-25
• /
• 2020

The World Health Organization estimated that more than a billion people (or 15% of the world's population) lives with disabilities. They have the same information needs as non-disabled people. Nevertheless, as the World Blind Union estimated, less than 10% of published books are ever made into accessible formats in developed countries. The role of the national library should be very important to improve the information accessibility for the disabled. Based on this perspective, this study analyzed and compared the history and development, legal basis and organization, main functions and tasks, and service features for the disabled for the Library of Congress of the United States, MTM(Myndigheten för Tillgängliga Medier) of Sweden, National Diet Library of Japan, and SALB (South African Library for the Blind) of Republic of South Africa representing the nationwide disability services by continent. And based on the results of the analysis, this study suggested ways to strengthen the capacity of the National Library for the Disabled of Korea.

• Journal of Digital Contents Society
• /
• v.12 no.3
• /
• pp.279-289
• /
• 2011

The latest hardware and software techniques are combined to give safe walking guidance and convenient service of realtime walking assistance system for visually impaired person. This system consists of obstacle detection and perception, place recognition, and sign recognition for pedestrian can safely walking to arrive at their destination. In this paper, we exploit the sign object detection system in subway station for sign recognition that one of the important factors of walking assistance system. This paper suggest the adaptive feature map that can be robustly extract the sign object region from complexed environment with light and noise. And recognize a sign using fast zernike moment features which is invariant under translation, rotation and scale of object during walking. We considered three types of signs as arrow, restroom, and exit number and perform the training and recognizing steps through adaboost classifier. The experimental results prove that our method can be suitable and stable for real-time system through yields on the average 87.16% stable detection rate and 20 frame/sec of operation time for three types of signs in 5000 images of sign database.

• Journal of the Korean Institute of Educational Facilities
• /
• v.21 no.3
• /
• pp.19-28
• /
• 2014

Student halls and their convenient facilities have been a focal point for various student activities at university campus. It has been for most of the student a place of unique memories and of attachment often associated with those good and bad school days. However, it is questionable whether these facilities are supportive and accessible for all of the students and other users including the handicapped. Therefore, based on the concept of UD(universal design) which was widely applied to U.S. institutions, this study intended to evaluate student hall facilities in U.S. and to provide an improvement direction for Korean UD application. For that purpose, four universities were selected for an in-depth analysis and 76 survey indices were utilized based on previous research. It was found that (1) design consideration without braille sign for VIP(visually impaired person) in student buildings can be differently approached with electronic devices; (2) the best demonstration of UD in student buildings can be seen in spacious flat pathway, easy access through ramp and wide entry area, necessary for people in wheel-chairs, but used by all, implying an increase of the ratio of public space; (3) one of the good UD features is an attractive physical environment rather than institutional appearance, in which they ultimately will support and completely adaptable at optimal levels by everyone; (4) consistent maintenance and management maximize the potential of UD principles and minimize physical limitations.