Raspberry Pi Based Reader for Blind

Abstract

The Braille machines are expensive and as a result, are not accessible to many. In particular, there is a need for a portable text reader that is affordable and readily available to the blind community. The designed system is a portable, low-cost, reading device made for blind people. The designed system also overcomes the limitation of a conventional Braille machine by making it affordable for the common masses. This paper proposes a smart reader for visually challenged people using raspberry pi. This paper addresses the integration of a complete Text Read-out system designed for the visually challenged. The designed system consists of a webcam interfaced with raspberry pi which accepts a page of printed text. This system uses OCR technology to convert images into text and reads out the text by using Text-to-Speech conversion. This system supports audio output via Speakers as well as headphones. The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) package is installed in raspberry pi which scans it into a digital document which is then subjected to skew correction, and segmentation, before feature extraction to perform classification. Once classified, the text is read out by a text-to-speech conversion unit (TTS engine) installed in raspberry pi. The output is fed to an audio amplifier before it is read out.