Advanced Real Time Embedded Book Braille System

Abstract

—Reading is an activity that leads to acquiring information and developing a person’s knowledge. Therefore, everyone should have equal access to the same sources of information. Unfortunately, blindness is a disease that restricts the affected people from reading books that are not converted into Braille. This paper describes a novel solution for the real-time conversion of any text into Braille. The system will rely on image processing and a camera to gather the raw text data from any book in physical format. Furthermore, e-books and documents in any digital format, Braille Ready Format (BRF), Portable Embosser Files (PEF), TXT, PDF, or PNG, can be provided for Braille conversion. Image enhancement algorithms, neural networks, and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) algorithms are used to extract accurate content. The process is controlled by a Raspberry Pi 4. A refreshable Braille mechanism, based on an Arduino Due microcontroller, is used to display the dots for each character. The algorithms are implemented to work with the mechanical structure design that was created to reduce the cost and give the user a complete reading experience of any book.