Visual Sonification System Provides Low-cost Aid for Visually Impaired From: University of Michigan EECS News - 2012 - page 25 Researchers led by Profs. Todd Austin and Silvio Savarese have developed a technique for converting the visual properties of objects into sound signals. The Michigan Visual Sonification System (MVSS) utilizes this process to assist the visually impaired in distinguishing different objects in their surroundings. MVSS uses depth information to first segment and localize objects and then represents an object's appearance using histograms of visual features that are converted to sounds. The system then relies on the considerable discriminating power of the human brain to localize and "classify" the sounds, thus enabling the user to distinguish between visually distinct object classes. Funding for the project was provided by the Gigascale Systems Research Center and the National Science Foundation. Source: http://www.eecs.umich.edu/eecs/about/EECSNews/EECSNews12.pdf Links: MVSS: Michigan Visual Sonification System http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpls/abs_all.jsp?arnumber=6152466&tag=1 http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~jclemons/publications/MVSS.pdf Michigan Visual Sonification System: Driving Efficient Mobile Vision Designs http://developer.download.nvidia.com/GTC/PDF/GTC2012/Posters/P0536_GTCPosterv2.pdf Todd Austin http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~taustin/