A video based interface to textual information for the visually impaired

Author

Zandifar, Ali ; Duraiswami, Ramani ; Chahine, Antoine ; Davis, Larry S.

Author_Institution

Perceptual Interfaces & Reality Lab., Maryland Univ., College Park, MD, USA

fYear

2002

fDate

2002

Firstpage

325

Lastpage

330

Abstract

We describe the development of an interface to textual information for the visually impaired that uses video, image processing, optical-character-recognition (OCR) and text-to-speech (TTS). The video provides a sequence of low resolution images in which text must be detected, rectified and converted into high resolution rectangular blocks that are capable of being analyzed via off-the-shelf OCR. To achieve this, various problems related to feature detection, mosaicing, auto-focus, zoom, and systems integration were solved in the development of the system.

Keywords

feature extraction; handicapped aids; image segmentation; image sequences; optical character recognition; speech synthesis; user interfaces; video signal processing; OCR; auto-focus; feature detection; high resolution rectangular blocks; image processing; low resolution image sequence; mosaicing; systems integration; text-to-speech; textual information; video based interface; visually impaired; zoom; Books; Digital cameras; Educational institutions; Image recognition; Image resolution; Laboratories; Layout; Optical character recognition software; Speech synthesis; Text recognition;

fLanguage

English

Publisher

ieee

Conference_Titel

Multimodal Interfaces, 2002. Proceedings. Fourth IEEE International Conference on

Print_ISBN

0-7695-1834-6

Type

conf

DOI

10.1109/ICMI.2002.1167016

Filename

1167016