Designing Tactile graphics for the blind and visually impaired

Abstract

This project builds upon the previous version of TacTile, which was developed in the prior semester using an EfficientNetV2-B0 and YOLO-based backbone. In the current version, we transitioned to using the MediaPipe Hand Landmark detector combined with a plain JSON file to store coordinates of the desired regions. To improve the robustness of the application, we have now trained a YOLOv8 model specifi- cally on cropped map regions. This enhancement ensures that the application functions reliably regardless of the phone’s height or position, as long as it remains parallel to the map surface. We are still using mediapipe for Hand Landmark ditector.