Finger Braille recognition system for people who communicate with deafblind people

Abstract

Finger Braille is one of tactual communication media of deafblind people. In one-handed finger Braille, a sender dots the left part of Braille code on the DIP joints of index, middle and ring fingers of a receiver, and then the sender dots the right part of Braille code on the PIP joints of them. 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 paper, we developed a finger Braille recognition system. And evaluation experiments of recognition of monosyllables and sentences were carried out. As the results of the evaluation experiment of recognition of monosyllables, the accuracy of recognition of dotted fingers was 92.9% and the recognition system was independent of dotted strength, dotted position and receiver. The accuracy of recognition of dotted positions was 81.9% and the recognition system could recognize dotted positions if the receiver's hand shaped a natural longitudinal arch on the desk. As the results of the evaluation experiment of recognition of sentences, the accuracy of recognition of dotted fingers by dotting was 89.7% and the accuracy of recognition of dotted positions by dotting was 92.3%. Therefore the recognition system could recognize the sentences accurately when the interpreter dotted clearly. And the receiver should re-set his/her hand on the desk when he/she noticed cut-down of accuracy of recognition.