Text Recognition System for Visually Impaired using Portable Camera

Abstract

Text detection in natural and complex images play an important role in analysis of image. Text information appears everywhere like product labels, documents, scene images etc. It will be very difficult for visually impaired person to find text region in an image. This problem should be addressed because it cannot assume that the captured image contains only text. This paper presents camera-based text reading framework which helps visually impaired people to read texts in natural scenes, product labels etc. Here, task is divided into two steps i.e. text detection and text recognition. Text detection involves text localization phase. Firstly, we binarize the image. Geometric and stroke width filtering removes non text regions an image. Segmented text region in a cluttered scene is binarized and recognized by optical character recognition. Recognized texts are output to the visually impaired people in speech. Experimental result shows that proposed method offers better performance in text recognition.