Portable Camera Based Assistive Product Label Reading for Blind and Visually Impaired Individuals

Abstract: We propose 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. In this paper Camera acts as main vision to capture the image of product packaging and hand held objects. To isolate the object from complex backgrounds, we first propose an effective motion-based method to define a region of interest (ROI) in the image. In the extracted ROI, text localization and recognition are conducted to acquire text information. Then text characters are recognized by off-the-shelf optical character recognition (OCR) software. Using text to speech convertor the extracted texts are output in audio output.

Keywords: camera-based assistive text reading, motion-based method, text localization and recognition, off-the-shelf optical character recognition