Finger Braille Recognition System for Non-disabled People who Communicate with Deafblind People

Abstract

Finger Braille is one of tactual communication medium of deafblind people. In two-handed Finger Braille, index finger, middle finger and ring finger of both hands are likened to keys of a Braille typewriter. A sender dots Braille code on the fingers of a receiver like whether he/she does the type of the Braille typewriter. Then the receiver recognizes the Braille code. Deafblind people who are skilled in Finger Braille can catch up with speech conversation and express various emotions. Because there are small non-disabled people who are skilled in Finger Braille, deafblind people communicate only with interpreters. In this study, we note one-handed Finger Braille. In one-handed Finger Braille, the sender dots the left column of Braille code on the DIP joints of three fingers of the receiver, and then the sender dots the right column of Braille code on the PIP joints of them. In this paper, we developed the Finger Braille Recognition System, which recognized deafblind people’s one-handed Finger Braille and converted to speech for non-disabled people. Non-disabled people wore small piezoelectric accelerometers on the base of index finger, middle finger and ring finger. The Recognition System detected the accelerations by dotting and recognized which fingers were dotted. Next, by parsing the recognized Braille codes, the Recognition System converted to a Japanese text. Finally, the Recognition System synthesized speech of the Japanese text. Because each accelerometer detected the acceleration by dotting of the mounted finger (self dotting) and the acceleration by dotting of the other fingers (cross talk). The Recognition System was necessary to recognize the acceleration by self dotting. We analyzed the accelerations dotted by an interpreter and derived the algorithm of recognition of dotted fingers. Estimated accuracy of recognition was 93.4%. Therefore it was considered that the algorithm was effective.