Abstract:
Reading is an ultimate goal of human beings which is unfortunately not available for
people affected by blindness. They can only read things which are in Braille system.
But we all know that every book has not been converted to Braille system. The main
problem of blind people for studying is that they cannot read and learn from
textbooks. Therefore, it would be extremely useful to find a method, such that a blind
person could read newspapers, textbooks, bills, etc. without the Braille system.
Android platform can be used to enable this opportunity for blind people for the
purpose of reading out loud any printed document or anything written using a
standard font. This research is completely focused on finding a way which could let
blind people be exposed to a new kind of reading. The main objective of this research
was to develop an android application which could identify words and various kinds
of symbols written using a standard font in a given document, and then convert them
to an audible format such that a blind person could understand. It will be effective
for a blind person by providing voice notifications and smart touch techniques. The
first step was to find an appropriate and efficient Optical Character Recognition
(OCR) technique which compatible with the Android platform. In order to fulfill that
requirement, the Tesseract OCR library was used. After lying dormant for more than
10 years, Tesseract is now behind the leading commercial engines because of its
accuracy. The next step was interface designing. In this application, there are two
main interfaces. One is for capturing the text, and another one is for displaying the
detected text. There are several operations that can be performed once it detects the
text, such as, ‘read again’ function. Then, the OCR implementation for the Android
platform has been successfully completed. For the future improvements, the
application should be enhanced to guide the blind person to capture the image of the
paper or the page of a book. For that, the OpenCV library can be used for paper
detection and the smart voice commands for giving instructions to the blind.
