Totally blind people can also see with their ears, and I do not mean echolocation but live visual input from a camera encoded in sound,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AZ1xigijrxQ

(Russian blind man wearing The vOICe vision glasses, learning to reach for multiple objects cast on a table top)

Richard B. McDonald, another blind recipient of an Orion I visual cortical prosthesis, has written a book about his experiences, titled "My Brain Implant for Bionic Vision: The First Trial of Artificial Sight for the Blind" https://www.amazon.com/Brain-I...

Smart Fingertip Camera to Help Blind People http://www.infoniac.com/hi-tech/smart-fingertip-camera-to-help-blind-people.html At first glance this looks like prior art

I'll gladly cooperate with Sergey Brin on "Seeing With Your Ears" http://www.seeingwithsound.com/ to "hear" an otherwise inaccessible environment

Good points, John. There is still a long way to go for visual prostheses to become usable, convenient and safe options even for totally blind people.

It's called "Talk to Me" by Flaviu Negrean, and it currently supports speech-to-speech translation from English to Spanish, French, German and Italian. Works well on my Android 1.6 phone. http://www.androlib.com/android.application.info-fidogames-apps-talktome-zwnB.aspx

This is much the same concept as recently presented at ICDSC-2009 in the paper "Abnormal Motion Detection in a Real-time Smart Camera System", based on real-time video analytics and artificial neural networks to autonomously build a model of what is considered normal behavior, subsequently flagging outliers as possible events that require further (human) scrutiny. Thus it acts as an intelligent self-learning classifier/filter that greatly reduces the information stream per camera for human operators.