Title: Enhanced portable text to speech converter for visually impaired

Authors: Chithra Selvaraj; N. Bhalaji

Addresses: Department of Information Technology, SSN College of Engineering, Chennai, 603110, India ' Department of Information Technology, SSN College of Engineering, Chennai, 603110, India

Abstract: The handwritten text reader is designed to help the visually impaired listen to an audio read-back of printed and handwritten scanned text. A hand-held page scanner is used to scan the text to be read. The image from the scanner is sent to the application in the paired Android phone over Bluetooth. An open source optical character recognition (OCR) engine, Tesseract is used to extract the text from the image, and this extracted text is converted to speech. Tesseract OCR engine is further trained to recognise handwritten text for a specific user. This OCR engine is trained with handwritten datasets. In addition to English, the application supports two regional languages - Hindi and Bengali.

Keywords: handwriting recognition; Tesseract; OCR; optical character recognition; text to speech; Android; visually impaired.

DOI: 10.1504/IJISTA.2018.091586

International Journal of Intelligent Systems Technologies and Applications, 2018 Vol.17 No.1/2, pp.42 - 54

Received: 14 Feb 2017
Accepted: 09 Apr 2017
Published online: 08 May 2018 *

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