Single-Sided Braille into Corresponding Text

Abstract

The world is moving at a rate too fast for us to fathom. Our world is not functionally accessible for individual of any disability to be completely independent. For the mankind to move forward with time, a holistic approach in development can create an environment where no individual can feel overlooked. It is estimated that approximately 1.3 billion people live with some form of vision impairment out of which 36 million people are blind [1]. Without proper integration of such people in our society; every discovery, every news is creating a divide between the people whose mental abilities are impalpable otherwise. With this paper, our aim is to convert the Braille books written in regional language (in this case, Hindi) into its corresponding text format so that those people can be part of the world every Scientist, Engineer, a Visionary, every child dreamed of. In this project, a picture of braille text would be fed as an input and a series of techniques in preprocessing, Segmentation, Character Extraction, Character Recognition and Text Conversion will be applied to it resulting in an output image that will be the corresponding Hindi format of that braille text image. The main application of this could be seen in the lives of the families of the visually impaired to understand what is inscribed in the braille format, correction of the answer-script of any braille exams, cross-checking for errors in manufacturing of braille documents, and increase in opportunities for participation of visually impaired in the social section of life.