An optical data transmission system for blind persons by means of a mobile phone with the Android operating system

The paper describes an optical data transmission system supporting blind and partially sighted persons in an indoor navigation, mainly in identification of offices in public buildings. Two‐dimensional data matrix barcodes (ISO/IEC 16022) are sequentially displayed on a small LED matrix mounted on a wall in a close proximity to all potential points of interest. The user must be equipped with an Android mobile device with a pre‐installed software, which locates and processes barcode sequences recorded by a camera. Sequences are decoded as plain text English messages and read by an additional text‐to‐speech software installed on the mobile device. To evaluate its performance, the system was implemented and tested at the Lodz University of Technology. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.