Paper Reading for Blinds using Raspberry Pi

Text Reader allows someone with impaired vision to ?read? text from envelopes, letters and other items.  It snapshots an image of the item, converts to plain text using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and then speaks the text using text-to-speech. The Reader is designed to be as absolutely

Project Title

Paper Reading for Blinds using Raspberry Pi

Project Area of Specialization

Artificial Intelligence

Project Summary

Text Reader allows someone with impaired vision to “read” text from envelopes, letters and other items.  It snapshots an image of the item, converts to plain text using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and then speaks the text using text-to-speech. The Reader is designed to be as absolutely simple to use as possible. No Internet needed, no graphical interface, only one button.  Just place the item to be read onto the stand and press a button. After a few moments, the text will be read back to them. 

We designed this for an elderly parent with eye sight issues such as macular degeneration, but can be used more broadly for anyone wanting printed text translated into audio speech. 

There are many readers available, most though, cost thousands of dollars or are for someone who is tech savvy requiring Internet connectivity and the use of a smart phone.  This reader is designed to be completely standalone with no internet and no interface other than a large push button.

Project Objectives

The main objective of this project presents the automatic document reader project for visually impaired people, developed on Raspberry Pi3. It uses the Optical character recognition technology for the identification of the printed characters using image sensing devices and computer programming. It converts images of typed, handwritten, or printed text into machine encoded text. In this research these images are converted into the audio output (Speech) through the use of OCR and Text-to-speech synthesis. The conversion of printed document into text files is done using Raspberry Pi which again uses Tesseract library and Python programming. The text files are processed by Open CV library & python programming language and audio output is achieved.

Project Implementation Method

Speech and text is the main medium for human communication. A person needs vision to access the information in a text. However those who have poor vision can gather information from voice. This paper proposes a camera based assistive text reading to help visually impaired person in reading the text present on the captured image. The faces can also be detected when a person enter into the frame by the mode control. The proposed idea involves text extraction from scanned image using Tesseract Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and converting the text to speech by e-Speak tool, a process which makes visually impaired persons to read the text. This is a prototype for blind people to recognize the products in real world by extracting the text on image and converting it into speech. Proposed method is carried out by using Raspberry pi and portability is achieved by using a battery backup. Thus the user can carry the device anywhere and able to use at any time. Upon entering the camera view previously stored faces are identified and informed which can be implemented as a future technology. This technology helps millions of people in the world who experience a significant loss of vision

Snapshots an image of the item, converts to plain text using OCR (Optical Character Recognition) and then speaks the text using text-to-speech

Benefits of the Project

1. pratically helpful for old age people to read newspaper and magzines.
2. No Language barrier
3. Involvement of Blinds in the development of country.
4. This can help an underdeveloped country like pakistan to use its man power up to maximum level.

Technical Details of Final Deliverable

Hadware softawre implementation.the Work is in progress and hopefully will be completed in its time frame.

Final Deliverable of the Project

HW/SW integrated system

Type of Industry

IT

Technologies

Others

Sustainable Development Goals

Decent Work and Economic Growth

Required Resources

If you need this project, please contact me on contact@adikhanofficial.com