A SMART READER FOR VISUALLY IMPAIRED PEOPLE USING RASPBERRY PI

Abstract

According to the World Health organization (WHO), 285 million people are estimated to be visually impaired worldwide among which 90% live in developing countries. and forty-five million blind individuals world-wide. Though there are many existing solutions to the problem of assisting individuals who are blind to read, however none of them provide a reading experience that in any way parallels that of the sighted population. In particular, there is a need for a portable text reader that is affordable and readily available to the blind community. Inclusion of the specially enabled in the IT revolution is both a social obligation as well as a computational challenge in the rapidly advancing digital world today. This work proposes a smart reader for visually challenged people using raspberry pi. This paper addresses the integration of a complete Text Read-out system designed for the visually challenged. The system consists of a webcam interfaced with raspberry pi which accepts a page of printed text. The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) package installed in raspberry pi scans it into a digital document which is then subjected to skew correction, segmentation, before feature extraction to perform classification. Once classified, the text is readout by a text to speech conversion unit (TTS engine) installed in raspberry pi. The output is fed to an audio amplifier before it is read out. The simulation for the proposed project can be done in MATLAB. The simulation is just an initiation of image processing ie., the image to text conversion and text to speech conversion done by the OCR software installed in raspberry pi. The system finds interesting applications in libraries, auditoriums, offices where instructions and notices are to be read and also in assisted filling of application forms. Results along with analysis are presented.

Existing System

Proposed System

Architecture

BLOCK DIAGRAM