Development of Blind Football Play-by-play System for Visually Impaired Spectators: Tangible Sports

In the field of sports, visually impaired spectators are unfortunately at a disadvantage in terms of understanding the precise developments of a game. To provide such information to them, making play-by-play announcements of the live coverage of the game is the best approach; however, this is infeasible as it is difficult to employ a professional commentator for every game. Therefore, this study proposes a blind football play-by-play system, combining a tactile graphic display function and a position acquisition function, to aid visually impaired spectators understand game developments. To conduct a basic study, an experimental system was developed herein, which detects the positions of the players and ball using image processing technology and deep learning, and shows these positions via a refreshable tactile display. The validity of the proposed system was then established through subjective experiments. This system provides a rich user experience to the spectators as well as being a powerful feedback tool to the players. Moreover, an audio–tactile graphic system, which can be used to overcome tactile cognitive limitations, can be implemented as an application of the system in the future.