Smart Reader for Visually Impaired People Based on Optical Character Recognition

Abstract

There are millions of visually impaired people in the world. According to the World Health Organization (WHO) data on visual impairment, 1.3 billion people are living with some kind of visual impairment while 36 million people are completely visually impaired. Reading is one of the major necessities of visually impaired people. Numerous researchers have worked on developing a mechanism that allows blind people to detect obstacles, to read the labels or specific currencies and to read the written, typed or printed text. We proposed a system which facilitates the visually impaired people by converting the text into voice signal based on raspberry pi. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) scheme is employed for the detection of printed text using a camera. Typed, handwritten characters or text are converted into machine-encoded text. The proposed method is developed on the raspberry pi in which OCR is employed for an image to audio converter which is the output of the system. It is a smart real-time device based on OCR.