Character detection and recognition system for visually impaired people

Nowadays, increasing use of digital technology, availability of economical image capturing devices like mobile phones, digital cameras, etc. and need of powerful technology to aid blind or visually impaired people, attracting researchers to the problem of recognizing text in images. Detecting text from scene image is more difficult as compared to that from printed documents. Lots of research has been done on detecting scene text to overcome certain challenges like perspective distortion, aspect ratio, font size, etc. Speed, complexity, cost and accuracy are important parameters must be taken into consideration while designing such systems. Computer vision is one of the emerging technologies that can be used to aid visually impaired people for navigation (both indoor and outdoor), accessing printed material, etc. This paper describes an approach to extract and recognize text from scene images effectively using computer vision technology and to convert recognized text into speech so that it can be incorporated with hardware to develop Electronic travel aid for visually impaired people in future.