Visually impaired people seek social integration, yet their mobility is restricted. They need a personal navigation system that can provide privacy and increase their confidence for better life quality. In this paper, based on deep learning and neural architecture search (NAS), we propose an intelligent navigation assistance system for visually impaired people. The deep learning model has achieved significant success through well-designed architecture. Subsequently, NAS has proved to be a promising technique for automatically searching for the optimal architecture and reducing human efforts for architecture design. However, this new technique requires extensive computation, limiting its wide use. Due to its high computation requirement, NAS has been less investigated for computer vision tasks, especially object detection. Therefore, we propose a fast NAS to search for an object detection framework by considering efficiency. The NAS will be used to explore the feature pyramid network and the prediction stage for an anchor-free object detection model. The proposed NAS is based on a tailored reinforcement learning technique. The searched model was evaluated on a combination of the Coco dataset and the Indoor Object Detection and Recognition (IODR) dataset. The resulting model outperformed the original model by 2.6% in average precision (AP) with acceptable computation complexity. The achieved results proved the efficiency of the proposed NAS for custom object detection.
Keywords: anchor-free model; deep learning; neural architecture search (NAS); object detection; obstacle detection; visually impaired people.