Real-Time Arabic Text-Reading for Visually Impaired People

Visually impaired (VI) people suffer from many difficulties when accessing printed material using existing technologies. These problems may include text alignment, focus, accuracy, software processing speed, mobility, and efficiency. Current technologies such as flatbed scanners and OCR programs need to scan an entire page. Recently, VI people prefer mobile devices because of their handiness and accessibility, but they have problems with focusing the mobile camera on the printed material. In this paper, a real-time Arabic text-reading prototype for VI people is proposed. It is based on using a wearable device for a hand finger. It is designed as a wearable ring attached to a tiny webcam device. The attached camera captures the printed Arabic text and passes it to the Arabic OCR system. Finally, the recognized characters are translated into speech using the text-to-speech (TTS) technology. Experimental results demonstrate the feasibility of the proposed prototype. It achieved an accuracy of 95.86% for Arabic character recognition and 98.5% for English character recognition.