StreetNav: Leveraging Street Cameras to Support Precise Outdoor Navigation for Blind Pedestrians

Blind and low-vision (BLV) people rely on GPS-based systems for outdoor navigation. GPS's inaccuracy, however, causes them to veer off track, run into unexpected obstacles, and struggle to reach precise destinations. While prior work has made precise navigation possible indoors via additional hardware installations, enabling precise navigation outdoors remains a challenge. Ironically, many outdoor environments of interest such as downtown districts are already instrumented with hardware such as street cameras. In this work, we explore the idea of repurposing street cameras for outdoor navigation, and investigate the effectiveness of such an approach. Our resulting system, StreetNav, processes the cameras' video feeds using computer vision and gives BLV pedestrians real-time navigation assistance. Our user evaluations in the COSMOS testbed with eight BLV pedestrians show that StreetNav guides them more precisely than GPS, but its performance is sensitive to lighting conditions and environmental occlusions. We discuss future implications for deploying such systems at scale.