Image & Graphic Reader

The Image & Graphic Reader (IGR) is an assisting tool to retrieve information from business charts and present it to blind computer users. Different business charts occurring in newspapers and Web sites are analyzed by standard image processing methods. Common segmentation algorithms produce homogeneous areas and contour lines that characterize specific chart types. Since the component's geometric features encode the tabular content of the chart, their dimensions are measured against a certain scale. This scale is either explicitly defined in the image, like scales of a previously identified axis or is intrinsic to the type of the chart (e.g. angles in pie charts). After the primal classification the extracted tabular data is analyzed to produce a representation that subdivides a chart into predefined levels which are then verbally described. A blind user can thus navigate through the levels by keyboard and the spoken feedback of a speech synthesizer.