Mishathi

Mishathi is a smart vision aimed at helping the visually impaired in their daily lives. The device identifies object, reads text and identifies people known to the user and relays the information through an audio output.

Visual impairment can be hereditary, caused due to injury or age, this could be ephemeral or permanent. This curtails a person’s quality of life and has numerous psychological effects.
There exist a few techniques to treat these impairments, such as, retinal prosthesis and neurological implants. However, such invasive treatments have their drawbacks; such as, extensive surgery and difficulty of implementation.
We intend to develop a non invasive method of allowing people to perceive the outside world.
Mishathi (sanskrit for open eyes) intends to bring light back in their lives.

Causes of Blindness and Visual ailments

Blindness and visual impairment are critical problems and they arise due to a variety of reasons;
A Cataract is the clouding of the lens and the leading cause of blindness in India. It can be reversed by surgery.
Refractive error occurs when the eye doesn’t bend the light correctly, resulting in a blurred image.
Glaucoma is a group of eye conditions that damage the optic nerve.
Corneal pathologies or diseases of the cornea are associated with metabolic disorders
Blindness can also be caused due to conditions like uveitis or even accidents and old age.

Ophthalmologist Interviews Insights

Dr. Padmamalini is a benevolent person and her sympathy towards her patients drives her. Although the most common cause for blindness in India is cataract, the patients she works with are generally affected with uveitis, it occurs in approximately 10% of her patients and vision loss due to uveitis is generally irreversible. Patients with visual impairments tend to have difficulty moving around, problems of night vision impairment and with bright light.

She was enthusiastic about the prospects of a device that could potentially help the visually handicapped. She doesn’t think that retinal prosthesis is dangerous but it is far too expensive for her patients. She is in favour of non-invasive solutions as she believes that the other sense organs are very powerful when one is damaged, these heightened senses along with the audio signals could really better the life of patients. She even prefers these over invasive techniques since they will be more affordable and have no side effects. Loss of vision can psychologically affect a person and their family deeply and she wants for them to once again be able to get back on their feet and live a full life; she believes that artificial vision could really help them.

Dr. Padmamalini - Specialist in Uveitis and Ocular Immunology (Narayana Netralaya, Bangalore, India)

The Proposed System

The proposed system consists of a Raspberry Pi 4 Model B microprocessor, a RaspberryPi v2 camera, headphones, and sub components to satisfy the power and memory requirements. The memory requirements are satisfied using a 32GB Secure Digital (SD) card. The memory functions include storing data such as photographs acquired by the camera and machine learning modules on which the images are trained and assessed.
The system's software construct entails modules for text processing, object recognition, face recognition and sign language processing. They are implemented using python, tensorflow, OpenCV and neural network algorithms.

Find the link to the paper published below

S. S. Dhaded, S. Krishnan, M. P. Ganapathy, P. C. Rajesh and S. Ramaiah, "Mishathi - A Smart Vision System," 2022 2nd International Conference on Innovative Practices in Technology and Management (ICIPTM), 2022, pp. 15-20, doi: 10.1109/ICIPTM54933.2022.9754032.

Go to publication