Python Based Portable Virtual Text Reader

The idea of this paper is to build an automated virtual reader. In this modern era, there is an urge for an automated reader which is cost-effective, accurate and also portable at the same time. The product is based on a Raspberry Pi module that also has a camera connected to it which is used to take pictures. The whole bodywork is also integrated with Optical Character Recognition (OCR), Text-To-Speech (TTS) and a speaker. A Graphical User Interface (GUI) helps the users to take pictures with the help of a single click. A button is also integrated with the Raspberry Pi which helps initiate the program and carry out all the functions. After the successful capturing of the picture, the system carries out some basic image processing black and white conversion and de-noising. The processed image is then supplied to the Tesseract-OCR which understands the characters and TTS is used to convert the text to audio format. A software named eSpeak is used to read out the audio formatted file which is delivered as an output with the help of a speaker. Conversion of text to speech can also be done in Matlab but that wouldn't be portable and user-friendly.