SWAN is a project aimed at developing a highly functional navigation aid for people with impaired vision by providing audio cues about the environment. The overall design involves the use of CCD cameras mounted on a printed circuit board (PCB) interfaced to an FPGA and laptop, which are running algorithms for image processing and localization.

The SWAN project is a joint venture between Frank Dellaert of the College of Computing and Bruce Walker of the School of Psychology. The SWAN project is overseen by the Psychology Department's Sonification Lab at Georgia Institute of Technology.

As a project team in ECE 4180 and ECE 4006, we will work on this project over the course of ECE 4180 in the Fall of 2004 and ECE 4006 in the Spring of 2005. We will be working on the design for the custom PCB with a Xilinx Spartan II FPGA and 4 cameras that will take in a series of pictures of a person's surroundings and process those pictures to obtain information about the surroundings so that audio clues may be provided.