Design of an Automatic Reader for the Visually Impaired Using Raspberry Pi

Abstract

Reading is the most challenging problem for visually impaired people. It makes life more troublesome for them. Though there are braille technologies for blind persons to read any text, they are time taking approach. Some other newly arrived technology is also there for reading purpose. Here we proposed a prototype which focuses on the development of an automatic image-to-speech device for the visually impaired persons which will help with some daily tasks. This prototype is built using Raspberry Pi 4 Model B. The main purpose to develop this automatic reader is to allow a blind user to “read” text (a paper or any book). Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Text to Speech Synthesis (TTS) and some image processing algorithms are integrated into Raspberry Pi 4 (credit card sized mini computer). Tesseract OCR and eSpeak text to speech synthesizer are used here. This model enables the user to take a picture using a Raspberry Pi camera, hear the text (which exists in the paper or the book) by using any speaker and the whole process is controlled by using push buttons. Proposed reader can read the texts which are written in English, Bengali and Hindi languages.