Smart photo editor for differently-abled people using assistive technology

Abstract

Differently-abled people are significant minority groups, have many limitations to live everyday life, are starved of services, and are mostly ignored by society due to many types of disabilities. This problem may lead to massive frustrations and disappointments among themselves. Assistive technology may easily fill this gap with the enhanced different aiding applications. It helped in various ways, such as helping them to interact, communicate with people and allow people to do basic daily tasks by themselves. Nevertheless, there were fewer applications developed to entertain their leisure time. Therefore, the proposed solution provides a Smart Photo Editor, a hand-free mobile application with attractive photo editing features. This application focused on people having hand motor disabilities. Users can interact with the application using simple head gestures, eye gaze, and eye blinks. Head gestures and eye blinks are used as commands for application operations, while eye gaze is used for cursor enabling, which is helpful for navigation on application screens. Machine Learning (ML) and image processing techniques are used for real-time gesture recognition and eye gaze detection, using the input video frames captured by the inbuilt front-facing camera of the mobile phone. Moreover, in addition to the image processing techniques, Mask Recurrent-Convolutional Neural Network (R-CNN) is used to develop enhanced image adjusting features and customization of backgrounds based on object detection.