Portable Camera based Identification System for Visually Impaired People

The global expansion of visual impairment is a very sensitive subject. Living in constant uncertainty has always had a negative impact on many aspects of their lives. The digital revolution is accelerating in the fast-paced culture, and it has had a good impact on blind people's life as well. This study intends to develop a support system for those who are blind or visually impaired. People with visual impairments from the partially unsighted to the completely blind can use the image recognition and text navigation system to support and direct them via auditory commands. The tool includes the sequential operations of indoor obstacle detection and recognition. The presence of an object is identified using an ultrasonic sensor. Here, a single chip known as a Raspberry Pi is being integrated with both the text navigation device and the identification system. The Raspberry Pi operates with great accuracy and speed. An object is photographed by the navigation system's camera module, processed using the single shot detection (SSD) algorithm, and then converted to text by an optical character recognition (OCR) engine before being communicated over the speaker using the text-to-speech (TTS) converter tool. The object recognition and the text navigation system are specially designed for blind individuals to operate the tool conveniently in a solitary manner.