Speech-Based Interface for Visually Impaired Users

In recent years, there is a rising interest in aiding people with computer technologies. One of the possible research ways is the use of the wearable equipments with computation capability. With fast GUGPU computing, wearable equipments could provide users environmental information and measuring data captured by the worn sensors. In this paper, we proposed a systematic way to construct a speech interface for blind user to perceive environment surrounding. First, a automatic speech recognition system is built based on the Hidden Markov Model (HMM) framework. In order to understand the utterance from user in daily life, the spontaneous speech recognition is implemented. For speech generation, a personalized speech synthesis system is also included for the proposed system. Experimental results has shown that the performance of the speech recognition and synthesis achieve good performance. Therefore, the proposed speech interface could applied to other system such as computer vision system in order to help visual impaired people to perceive the environment and interact with other people in daily life.