Smart Specs: Voice assisted text reading system for visually impaired persons using TTS method

According to the World Health Organization, out of 7.4 billion population around 285 million people are estimated to be visually impaired worldwide. It is observed that they are still finding it difficult to roll their day today life and it is important to take necessary measure with the emerging technologies to help them to live the current world irrespective of their impairments. In the motive of supporting them We have proposed a smart spec for the blind persons which can perform text detection thereby produce a voice output. This can help the visually impaired persons to read any printed text in vocal form. A specs inbuilt camera is used to capture the text image from the printed text and the captured image is analyzed using Tesseract-Optical Character recognition (OCR). The detected text is then converted into speech using a compact open source software speech synthesizer, eSpeak. Finally, the synthesized speech is produced by the headphone by TTS method. In this project Raspberry Pi is the main target for the implementation, as it provides an interface between camera, sensors, and image processing results, while also performing functions to manipulate peripheral units (Keyboard, USB etc.,).