Automatic derivation of on-demand tactile maps for visually impaired people: first experiments and research agenda

ABSTRACT

Tactile maps are essential tools for visually impaired people to comprehend space and to support the simple pedestrian trips made difficult by their disability. Tactile maps are created manually and printed by specialists, and it takes a large amount of time to create a new one, which prevents using them on demand for everyday use. As a consequence, researchers and cartographers try to automate this creation process, but the existing automated derivation processes do not include generalization or advanced stylization steps, which limits their effectiveness. This paper reports first experiments to include such complex automated cartography processes to provide on-demand tactile maps for visually impaired people. These first experiments were more intended to raise real research issues than solve them, and the paper discusses these issues in a research agenda to achieve automatically derived tactile maps.

RÉSUMÉ

Les cartes tactiques sont des supports essentiels pour les malvoyants pour appréhender l’espace et pour faciliter les déplacements pédestres rendus difficiles par leur handicap. Les cartes tactiles sont fabriquées manuellement et imprimées par des spécialistes. Il faut donc un temps important pour fabriquer une nouvelle carte ce qui empêche un accès à la demande pour des utilisations quotidiennes. Par conséquent des chercheurs et cartographes essayent d’automatiser le processus de fabrication, mais les processus automatisés actuels de dérivation n’incluent pas les étapes de généralisation et de stylisation avancée ce qui limite leur efficacité. Ce papier présente les premières expériences pour inclure des processus de cartographie automatique complexes pour produire des cartes tactiles à la demande pour les personnes ayant des déficiences visuelles. Ces premières expériences ont davantage pour objectif d’identifier les réelles problématiques de recherche que leur résolution. Le papier discute ces questions dans le cadre d’un agenda de recherche pour parvenir à dériver des cartes tactiles de façon automatique.

KEYWORDS:

• Cartography
• tactile map
• visual impairment
• map generalization
• stylization
• 3D printing
• scale
• cognition

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Guillaume Touya is a senior researcher at the LASTIG, IGN France (the French mapping agency), and head of the COGIT research team. He holds a PhD and habilitation in GI science from Paris-Est University. His research interests focus on automated cartography, map generalization and volunteered geographic information. He currently leads the MapMuxing (https://mapmuxing.ign.fr) research project on mixing cartography and human–computer interaction issues.

Sidonie Christophe is a French senior research scientist at the IGN, with a full name Institut National de l’Information Géographique et Forestière, which is the French national mapping and forest inventory agency. She studied Agronomy and Life Sciences during her Engineering course at AgroCampus Ouest and received a Master in the engineering program in Spatial Information Processing in 2001. She decided to pursue research in GI Sciences, considering issues about acquiring, structuring, processing, analysing and visualising GI, as a full research object, implying an interdisciplinary approach between Geography and Computer Sciences. In particular, she started a PhD in 2006 at the IGN GI Sciences Lab with the COGIT team and focused on the issue of the personalisation of map design and how cartographic and artistic knowledge and methods could guide the users to select colour palettes. Next, she got a postdoctoral fellow at the Computer Sciences Lab of Grenoble, France, to propose a methodology to acquire and analyse daily human mobility based on GPS devices, implying a pluridisciplinary approach between geographers and computer scientists. At the end of 2010, she got a research scientist position in the COGIT team of the IGN GI Sciences Lab, on Geovisualisation issues: she pursued her research work about how to improve graphic representations based on the knowledge of visual variables and drawing techniques (design issues) while considering the diversity of users and uses, and their related perceptive and cognitive dimensions (cognition issues). This lead implies again a convergence between geography and computer sciences, about knowledge on graphic, visual and mental representations, involving a required and mutual benefit of making research from geography, cognitive sciences, human–computer interaction and computer graphics convergence about the notion of geographical space.

Dr Jean-Marie FAVREAU (male) received his Ph.D. thesis in 2009 on the topic “Tools for surface pavement”, which explored issues of surface segmentation, combining topological, geometrical and semantic approaches, with applications to medical imagery and computer graphics. After 1-year post-doc position at IMATI-GE (CNR, Genova, Italy), dedicated to topological segmentation issues, in September 2010, he has been recruited as an Assistant Professor at Université d'Auvergne (UdA), where he joined the ISIT laboratory (Image Science for Interventional Technics). There, he investigated issues of matching and segmentation of medical images. At the end of 2016, he joined the team G4 of the LIMOS and reoriented his activities towards the creation of maps for VIPs.

Amine Ben Rhaiem was a master student at Université Paris Diderot and Université Paris Est, doing an internship at LASTIG, IGN France, in the beginning of 2017.

ORCID

Guillaume Touya http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6113-6903

Sidonie Christophe http://orcid.org/0000-0002-2980-2803

Notes

1. Tactile Map Automated Production

2. Tactile Map Automated Creation System

3. http://www.cs.utah.edu/boulos/cs3505/obj_spec.pdf

4. https://github.com/IGNF/CartAGen