In this paper we introduce a real-time obstacle
recognition framework designed to alert the visually impaired
people/blind of their presence and to assist humans to navigate
safely, in indoor and outdoor environments, by handling a
Smartphone device. Static and dynamic objects are detected
using interest points selected based on an image grid and
tracked using the multiscale Lucas-Kanade algorithm. Next, we
activated an object classification methodology. We incorporate
HOG (Histogram of Oriented Gradients) descriptor into the
BoVW (Bag of Visual Words) retrieval framework and
demonstrate how this combination may be used for obstacle
classification in video streams. The experimental results
performed on various challenging scenes demonstrate that our
approach is effective in image sequence with important camera
movement, including noise and low resolution data and achieves
high accuracy, while being computational efficient.