Evaluating and Improving Optical Character Recognition (OCR) Efficiency in Recognizing Mandarin Phrases with Phonetic Symbols

The development of tools and materials for those people who are visually impaired is a crucial topic in the research area of assistive technologies. In mandarin learning, most printing materials for K-4 children have phonetic symbols to assist students in learning pronunciation. One challenge in the research area is recognizing the mandarin phrases in those printing materials and transforming them into audiobooks or Braille. To our knowledge, this is the first study examining the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) performance toward phonetic symbols in mandarin. In this study, we conduct experiments on recognizing images with mandarin phrases with phonetic symbols by the side using the OCR system. We propose candidate methods to improve recognition efficiency in the future based on preliminary results.