LITERATURE SURVEY

Smart reader for visually impaired [2018]

Usually many people suffered from visual disabilities. Written transcript is an appearing form of
information that is unapproachable by a lot of sightless and visually impaired except it is
symbolized in a non-visual form like Braille. Smart reader is a need of an effective system for
visually impaired. The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) functions of MATLAB for
converting image to text. This paper proposes the smart reader system for visually impaired.
Here proposed a novel audio-tactile user interface that supports the user to read the information

Portable computer vision based assisting device for the visually impaired people [2015]

This project presents a complete aid to the visually impaired people. The application deals
mainly with face detection and recognition for the blind user helping them to survive
independently in their house. In this project we are using a Raspberry pi B+ module and a
Raspberry pi camera module which is of 5MHz is found to be interfaced in the processor by
using a camera serial interface cable. The process works in such a way that when the webcam is
displayed it first searches for a face to check whether it is a human being or an object. Then it
processes to check for the eyes. The eye search region is one of the important criteria for face
detection. Once the eyes are detected it then starts collecting the samples for training and all
these files are found to be saved properly. When the collection process is over the final step will
be to recognize the face. So when an input image is applied it checks for the above criteria and it
predicts the name of the person through a spoken message. This spoken message can be known
to the blind user by wearing a headset so if it is a known user it will tell the name of the person
suppose if it is an unknown user it alerts the person by telling that it is an unauthorized person.

Autonomous OCR dictating system for blind people [2016]

In this study, the main idea is the development of an autonomous mobile system for dictating
text documents via image processing algorithm for blind people. The system is constituted by the
Raspberry Pi 2B - the mobile processing unit- and a pair of specially designed glasses with an
HD camera and Bluetooth headset. The blind user should hold the book open (two pages) with
his hands stretched straight at the level of his eyes; then a calibration procedure takes place in
order to capture the best image. Therefore, 1-D signal transformation of the above image is
produced in order to filter every text line. Finally, every word of each text line is identified via an
OCR (Optical Character Recognition) method and the user hears it via TTS (Text To Speech)
procedure.

Smart Glasses for the Visually Impaired People [2016]

People with visual impairment face various problems in their daily life as the modern assistive
devices are often not meeting the consumer requirements in term of price and level of assistance.
This paper presents a new design of assistive smart glasses for visually impaired students. The
objective is to assist in multiple daily tasks using the advantage of wearable design format. As a
proof of concept, this paper only presents one example application, i.e. text recognition
technology that can help reading from hardcopy materials. The building cost is kept low by using
single board computer raspberry pi 2 as the heart of processing and the raspberry pi 2 camera for
image capturing. Experiment results demonstrate that the prototype is working as intended.

Efficient Portable Camera Based Text to Speech Converter for Blind Person [2019]

Text Reader for Blind Person using camera module ensuring portability is the prototype made
using the Raspberry Pi 3b and Python to read the text from the handheld objects of the blind
person. This paper proposes a better approach for text localization and extraction for detection of
text areas in the images. The text size is an important factor whose dimension should be properly
elected to make the method more general and insensitive to various font shapes and sizes. The
proposed method involves four steps detection of an object, localization of the text, extraction of
the text and text to speech conversion. The Region of Interest is extracted from the cluttered
background and then the text localization algorithm is applied to locate and extract the text. After
extracting the text from the ROI, it is converted it into speech. It works more efficiently with
Optical Character Recognition. Convolutional recurrent neural network is proposed for training
the words separately. The experiment and training are performed on Synth 90k word dataset.
Finally using OCR and CRNN a proposed model has been developed.

Raspberry pi-based reader for blind people [2018]

This paper presents the automatic document reader for visually impaired people, developed on
Raspberry Pi. It uses the Optical character recognition technology for the identification of the
printed characters using image sensing devices and computer programming. It converts images
of typed, handwritten, or printed text into machine encoded text. In this research these images are
converted into the audio output (Speech) through the use of OCR and Text-to-speech synthesis.
The conversion of printed document into text files is done using Raspberry Pi which again uses
Tesseract library and Python programming. The text files are processed by OpenCV library &
python programming language and audio output is achieved.

OCR based automatic book reader for the visually impaired using raspberry pi [2016]

This paper aims at making an open-source audio book software to build a book reader with
raspberry pi controls. Here in this paper, we present the Pi Book reader which can read a real
book aloud and also turn the pages of the book. The overall process of the project involves Image
to Text conversion and then Text to Speech conversion. The image to text conversion is carried
out with the help of OCR [Optical Character Recognition]. The Optical Character Recognition
Technology can be used to convert various kinds of documents like images, scanned documents
and PDF files. The OCR algorithm involves various stages like Scanning, Preprocessing, Feature
Extraction, Classification and Recognition. Finally, E-Speak voice command software is used to
convert the obtained text from OCR into speech command. This converted speech is read aloud
by a speaker connected to the Raspberry Pi. The programming language that we have used is
python. This project is practical and of great use for the visually impaired.

“Text recognition and face detection aid for visually impaired person using raspberry pi,”
[2017]

Speech and text is the main medium for human communication. A person needs vision to access
the information in a text. However, those who have poor vision can gather information from
voice. This paper proposes a camera based assistive text reading to help visually impaired person
in reading the text present on the captured image. The faces can also be detected when a person
enter into the frame by the mode control. The proposed idea involves text extraction from
scanned image using Tesseract Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and converting the text to
speech by e-Speak tool, a process which makes visually impaired persons to read the text. This is
a prototype for blind people to recognize the products in real world by extracting the text on
image and converting it into speech. Proposed method is carried out by using Raspberry pi and
portability is achieved by using a battery backup. Thus the user can carry the device anywhere
and able to use at any time. Upon entering the camera view previously stored faces are identified
and informed which can be implemented as a future technology. This technology helps millions
of people in the world who experience a significant loss of vision.

Smart specs: Voice assisted text reading system for visually impaired persons using TTS
method [2017]

According to the World Health Organization, out of 7.4 billion population around 285 million
people are estimated to be visually impaired worldwide. It is observed that they are still finding it
difficult to roll their day today life and it is important to take necessary measure with the
emerging technologies to help them to live the current world irrespective of their impairments. In
the motive of supporting them We have proposed a smart spec for the blind persons which can
perform text detection thereby produce a voice output. This can help the visually impaired
persons to read any printed text in vocal form. A specs inbuilt camera is used to capture the text
image from the printed text and the captured image is analyzed using Tesseract-Optical
Character recognition (OCR). The detected text is then converted into speech using a compact
open source software speech synthesizer, eSpeak. Finally, the synthesized speech is produced by
the headphone by TTS method. In this project Raspberry Pi is the main target for the
implementation, as it provides an interface between camera, sensors, and image processing
results, while also performing functions to manipulate peripheral units (Keyboard, USB etc.,).

Portable camera-based text reading of objects for blind persons [2018]

Here they proposed a camera-based assistive text reading framework to help blind persons to
read text labels from hand-held objects in their day to day lives Self-Dependency of blind people
is very important in their day-to-day lives. This paper presents a cost effective prototype system
to help blind persons to shop independently. As we know printed text is everywhere like product
names, instructions on medicine bottles, restaurant menus, signed boards etc. To read these text
blind and visually impaired people need some help? This paper presents a camera-based assistive
product label reader for blind persons to read information of the products. It is hard to detect text
due to the variations of text font, sizes, color text, clutter background and different orientation. In
this paper Camera is used to captured the image of the product. Then captured image is
processed internally using different algorithms such as text localization and text recognition
algorithm to extract text the label from image by using MATLAB. The extracted text label is
converted to audio output using text to speech converter and it is pronounced as audio to the
blind person.