Raspberry Pi Based Wearable Reader For Visually Impaired People with Haptic Feedback

Blind Reader is a portable, low-cost, reading device made for the blind people. The Braille machines are expensive and as a result are not accessible to many. In particular, there is a need for a portable text reader that is affordable and readily available to the blind community. Blind Reader overcomes the limitation of conventional Braille machine by making it affordable for the common masses.

This work proposes a smart reader for visually challenged people using raspberry pi. This work addresses the integration of a complete Text Read-out system designed for the visually challenged. The system consists of a webcam interfaced with raspberry pi which accepts a page of printed text. The system uses OCR technology to convert images into text and reads out the text by using Text-to-Speech conversion.

The system supports audio output via Speakers. The OCR (Optical Character Recognition) package installed in raspberry pi scans it into a digital document which is then subjected to skew correction, segmentation, before feature extraction to perform classification. Once classified, the text is readout by a text to speech conversion unit (TTS engine) installed in raspberry pi. The output is fed to an audio amplifier before it is read out.

Keywords: Raspberry pi, Web Cam, Optical Character Recognition, Text to Speech Engine, speaker, switch.