Angel's Girl for Blind Painters: An Efficient Painting Navigation System Validated by Multimodal Evaluation Approach

For people who ardently love painting but unfortunately have visual impairments, holding a paintbrush to create a work is a very difficult task. People in this special group are eager to pick up the paintbrush, like Leonardo da Vinci, to create and make full use of their own talents. Therefore, to maximally bridge this gap, we propose a painting navigation system called 'Angle's Eyes' to assist blind people in artistic creation. The proposed system is composed of cognitive system and guidance system. The system adopts drawing board positioning based on QR code, brush navigation based on target detection and bush real-time positioning. Meanwhile, we design a simple yet efficient position information coding rule to remind the user of the current brush tip position. In addition, we design a criterion to efficiently judge whether the brush reaches the target or not. The numerous experiments are conducted to optimize and test the performance of the system. The results of real-world scenario experiments demonstrate that the developed system has great potential to help blind people with painting. This work also demonstrates that it is practicable for the blind people to feel the world through the brush in their hands. In the future, we plan to deploy 'Angle's Eyes' on the phone to make it more portable.