Computer vision and text recognition for assisting visually impaired people using Android smartphone

Advances made with new technologies have boosted the development of systems to assist the daily lives of the visually impaired people. These systems intend to help by providing their user with some critical information about their environment using senses they can still use. In this paper, we discuss a system that uses existing technologies such as the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and Text-to-Speech (TTS) available on an Android smartphone, and use them to automatically identify and recognize texts and signs in the environment and help the users navigate. The proposed system uses a combination of computer vision and Internet connectivity on an Android smartphone not only to recognize signs, but also reconstruct sentences and convert them to speech. This paper discusses the design flow and the experimental results of the project.