Design of Smart Device Assistive Emergency WayFinder Using Vision Based Emergency Exit Sign Detection

In this paper, we present Emergency exit signs are installed to provide escape routes or ways in buildings like shopping malls, hospitals, industry, and government complex, etc. and various other places for safety purpose to aid people to escape easily during emergency situations. In case of an emergency situation like smoke, fire, bad lightings and crowded stamped condition at emergency situations, it's difficult for people to recognize the emergency exit signs and emergency doors to exit from the emergency building areas. This paper propose an automatic emergency exit sing recognition to find exit direction using a smart device. The proposed approach aims to develop an computer vision based smart phone application to detect emergency exit signs using the smart device camera and guide the direction to escape in the visible and audible output format. In this research, a CAMShift object tracking approach is used to detect the emergency exit sign and the direction information extracted using template matching method. The direction information of the exit sign is stored in a text format and then using text-to-speech the text synthesized to audible acoustic signal. The synthesized acoustic signal render on smart device speaker as an escape guide information to the user. This research result is analyzed and concluded from the views of visual elements selecting, EXIT appearance design and EXIT's placement in the building, which is very valuable and can be commonly referred in wayfinder system.