I crosschecked the Raspberry PI specs's against running the software designed by Peter Meijer who runs this site:
http://www.seeingwithsound.com/
He made software that takes webcam input and converts it into a soundscape, providing sight to the blind at a resolution that is more than competitive with surgical methods costing many orders of magnitude more.
In the drive to bring the cost of sight for the blind down, I think the rpi is the cheapest possible hardware platform to run this software on with the lowest power consumption (longest battery life, cheaper batteries), and I can't find any information on it being done yet. Current implementations use hardware that costs $400-500, and I believe with the rpi you can do it for $100.
They have produced a version as an android app, so I think it should be possible to make it run on the rpi, but I think you can do it at a lower level, and more effectively on the rpi than how the android app is operating. The android app has a lower resolution than the original program, probably because of performance issues, or maybe intellectual property issues.
I think this is a worthy goal, and I've already emailed him to make him aware if he isn't already. The more people who get in touch with him on the subject, the more likely he would be to set some code free for this purpose. I notice he has some free versions. Perhaps if we had rpi developers who would code not to exceed the capabilities of the free versions he might be interested
If you have coding skills, and think you could link up image processing with sound generation, then you should definitely get ahold of this guy!
I don't have low level coding skills, but these may not even be required. It looks like he is using high level languages on windows machines, and recommends processing power that is less than the rpi's specs.
If we could get a lower level implementation going, there should be no performance issues.
I like the rpi for silly projects, but this kind of project carries a lot of meaning for everyone. If you have the skills, please consider it. If you don't have the skills, I think politely pestering Peter about it might help spur it on.
Thanks, Mike
edit:
Peter is aware of this thread and has been posting. Therefore, its not necessary to pester him!
I got a reply from Peter as follows:
I am going to start sifting through that and see where it takes me.Hi Mike,
Thank you for your interest. Some people on the seeingwithsound list
http://www.seeingwithsound.com/subscribe.htm have been working towards
a version of The vOICe for Raspberry Pi, based on my elementary C code
from http://www.seeingwithsound.com/im2sound ... ial_scenes
and OpenCV. So you could join the seeingwithsound list and ask around
about the current status.
Best regards,
Peter Meijer
I found this so far (and duh? it's on this site. haha)
http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/tag/opencv
http://www.seeingwithsound.com/subscribe.htm