Text detection system for the blind

The system capable of localizing and reading aloud text embedded in natural scene images can be very helpful for blind and visually impaired persons - providing information useful in everyday life, it increases their confidence and autonomy. Even though the currently available optical character recognition (OCR) programs are fast and accurate, most of them fail to recognize text embedded in natural scene images. The goal of the algorithm described in this paper is to localize text-like image regions and pre-process them in a way that will make OCR work more reliably. The approach described in the paper is based on color image segmentation and segment shape analysis. Preliminary tests have shown that the proposed algorithm offers satisfactory detection rate and is pretty robust to typical text distortions, such as slant, tilt and bend.