Kyambogo University Lecturer Nkalubo Leonard from the Department of Computer Science is researching on how to “Integrating Computer Vision and Natural Language Processing” to guide blind movements.

He confirmed that his research is on a case study based on the University’s disability unit (UNISE) and health informatics.

The research was revealed during the 2019 Federated Conference on Computer Science and Information Systems. Doctoral Symposium (FedCSIS) (DS-RAIT’19) which was held in Leipzig, Germany from 1st – 4th September.

This is where Mr. Nkalubo got a chance to present his research ideas in a paper.

Machine learning concepts in artificial intelligence such as computer vision and Natural Language Processing (NLP) have become so popular in current trends of research in Computer Science and Health Informatics.

Nkalubo believes that the integration of these two concepts can help solve many problems in medical health and disability problems.

This will be through generating a description of medical images which can then be used by doctors and making a system which sees the surrounding and gives a spoken description of the same can be used by blind people.

Leonard presenting his paper during the 4th day of the conference, Leipzig, Germany

In addition, vision impairment is one of the most problems which elders face, implementing such a solution will reduce the hindrances faced by visionary impaired persons.

The implementation requires an advanced Smartphone equipped with language intelligence capabilities. This is to be attached to the blind person to capture surrounding images. It then connects to the central server equipped with a faster region convolutional neural network algorithm image detection. This algorithm will recognize images and multiple obstacles.

The server sends the results back to the Smartphones which are converted into a speech for the blind person’s guidance. The abstract revealed.

The research published on https://annals-csis.org/ marketed Kyambogo University as a resource center to provide excellent scholars who can share their research knowledge in advanced academic forums in Europe and it will increase Kyambogo’s global university rankings.

The research area will provide students with blind disabilities by offering quick, accurate and user-friendly machine learning solutions.

It will also strengthen the graduate programs in the Department of Computer Science of Kyambogo, which are yet to come.

Nkalubo believes that the concepts and tools in the research paper can be enlarged to making systems. These can convert spoken content in the form of some image. In addition, this may help persons who do not own the ability of speaking and hearing.

“The research is going on and we have already simulated the experiment using the Makerere AI lab. In addition, this is where there is a GPU and faster AI WIFI.

“I am going to get around 30M from staff development. I will run the research results in UNISE.” He told this website.

“By the end of October, there will be another publication with results in print. But already preliminary results are out and very positive. I will need to buy that Google 3xL phone and a GPU for use herein Kyambogo Univerity (KYU). After that, we shall use any fast WIFI.” Leonard added.

The paper is expected to be published in the IEEE digital library this week.

CREDIT: CYCLONE TIMES