Image Reader for Visually Impaired People

Abstract

In this society there are millions of visually impaired people, our paper introduces an innovative, efficient and real-time cost effective technique that enables user to hear the contents of text images instead of reading through them. It combines the concept of Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Text to Speech Synthesizer (TTS) in Raspberry pi. This type of system helps visually impaired people to interact with computers effectively through vocal interface. Text Extraction from color images is a challenging task in computer vision. Text-to-Speech conversion is a method that scans and reads English alphabets and numbers that are in the image using OCR technique and changing it to voices. This paper describes the design, implementation and experimental results of the device. This device consists of two modules, image processing module and voice processing module. The device was developed based on Raspberry Pi v2 with 900 MHz processor speed.