Thai Lottery Number Reader App for Blind Lottery Ticket Sellers

Many Thai people with visual impairments make a living by selling lottery tickets. To assist the blind in selling their tickets, we present a new Android app called LottoTU for scanning and reading aloud Thai lottery numbers for the blind. Our system includes lottery number segmentation, thresholding using Otsu's method, digit recognition using the Tesseract engine, and text-to-speech synthesis. Since lottery ticket images can be taken under different illumination conditions and at various orientations and distances to the smartphone camera, we implement three different sets of threshold values and morphological structuring element sizes to detect lottery number locations. The segmented lottery number images are thresholded using Otsu's method and converted into text data using the Tesseract OCR engine. The lottery number text data are then read aloud by text-to-speech software. The experimental results show that our LottoTU app successfully scans and reads aloud lottery numbers with high accuracy.