Title: Handy text reader based text to speech technology for visually impaired persons

Authors: D. Haripriya; Prathibhachand Bellamkonda; Marka Chandrika; Sachu Alekhya

Addresses: Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Anurag Group of Institutions, Ghatkesar, Hyderabad, Telangana, India ' Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Anurag Group of Institutions, Ghatkesar, Hyderabad, Telangana, India; Project Delivery (IL/IN), Applause Inc, Framingham (Global HQ), Massachusetts, USA ' Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Anurag Group of Institutions, Ghatkesar, Hyderabad, India ' Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Anurag Group of Institutions, Ghatkesar, Hyderabad, India

Abstract: Visually impaired persons are not able to read the text content on their own and most of them struggle to live independently. Braille reading system, audio tactile and digital speech synthesiser have been developed for the visually impaired persons. But always it is not possible to have Braille, audio and video form of printed work. Many researchers used optical character recognition (OCR) tools with IoT technology to improve the reading capability of poor eyesight persons. However, this approach is not comfortable for the reader as there is a possibility of missing certain words by reader during image to text conversion. A handy and cost effective text reader is proposed in this work to help the people to read on their own using text to speech technology. A camera interfaced with Raspberry Pi is used to capture the alphabets and numbers from the document and converted to text by PyTesseract OCR. The accuracy of the reader is 98% with the distance of 15 cm to 23 cm during day and night. The text document can be a handwritten script with minimum font size of 10 and it can be placed in any orientation.

Keywords: speech synthesiser; PyTesseract OCR; Braille reading system; text to speech technology; text reader; speech communication system.

DOI: 10.1504/IJVICS.2022.122564

International Journal of Vehicle Information and Communication Systems, 2022 Vol.7 No.2, pp.188 - 198

Received: 16 Aug 2020
Accepted: 13 May 2021

Published online: 03 May 2022 *

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