Text recognition and face detection aid for visually impaired person using Raspberry PI

Speech and text is the main medium for human communication. A person needs vision to access the information in a text. However those who have poor vision can gather information from voice. This paper proposes a camera based assistive text reading to help visually impaired person in reading the text present on the captured image. The faces can also be detected when a person enter into the frame by the mode control. The proposed idea involves text extraction from scanned image using Tesseract Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and converting the text to speech by e-Speak tool, a process which makes visually impaired persons to read the text. This is a prototype for blind people to recognize the products in real world by extracting the text on image and converting it into speech. Proposed method is carried out by using Raspberry pi and portability is achieved by using a battery backup. Thus the user can carry the device anywhere and able to use at any time. Upon entering the camera view previously stored faces are identified and informed which can be implemented as a future technology. This technology helps millions of people in the world who experience a significant loss of vision.