Page 138 - Abstract book - TJSSF-2020

Thailand – Japan Student Science Fair 2020 (TJ-SSF 2020)
“Seeding Innovations through Fostering Thailand – Japan Youth Friendship”

The Development of Guide Dog Robots

Pedestrian Light Recognition

Kota Sakamoto
1

Tokai University Takanawadai Senior High School
1

Abstract

Guide dogs cannot recognize pedestrian lights, so it is up to the users to decide whether to cross or not.
It is dangerous for the users because they must decide based on auditory information. So, it is important
to improve pedestrian light recognition in guide dog robots. The purpose of this research is to enable
guide dog robots to recognize pedestrian lights, even in countries other than Japan, by using simple
programs. There are four main steps to do this. Step 1: detecting the pedestrian lights. Step 2: identifying
the red light. Step 3: identifying the green light. Step 4: confirmation before crossing. This research
focused on Step 1. I compared pedestrian lights of 5 different countries and thought that it may be
possible to detect them in a simple way by focusing on the similarities of the pedestrian lights from
each country. I plan on using a method to recognize a rectangular object with a 2:1 length to width ratio
as a pedestrian light, and I am programming in Python using a library of contour extraction from Open
CV. It is still in the programming stage, but considering the possibility of false positives, it cannot be
confirmed that detection has been successfully completed at the end of Step 1. From now, I am going
to write the code and run the program to confirm it operates. From those results, I am going to consider
what needs to be improved and aim to complete Step 1.

Keywords: guide dog robots, pedestrian lights, programming

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