Abstract— The World HealthOrganization (WHO) reported that there are 285 million visually-impaired peopleworldwide. Among these individuals, there are 39 million who are totally blind.There have been several systems designed to support visually-impaired peopleand to improve the quality of their lives. Unfortunately, most of these systemsare limited in their capabilities. In this paper, we present a comparativesurvey of the wearable and portable assistive devices for visually-impairedpeople in order to show the progress in assistive technology for this group ofpeople. Thus, the contribution of this literature survey is to discuss indetail the most significant devices that are presented in the literature toassist this population and highlight the improvements, advantages,disadvantages, and accuracy. Our aim is to address and present most of theissues of these systems to pave the way for other researchers to design devicesthat ensure safety and independent mobility to visually-impaired people.
Keywords:assistivedevices; visually-impaired people; obstacles detection; navigation andorientation systems; obstacles avoidance