Nateq reading arabic text for visually impaired people

Abstract

Nateq is a system developed to aid visually impaired people in their daily life tasks. Nateq allows blind users to read text written on papers and labels using their mobile phones. It uses two sources to read text from, either from camera or photo gallery. In the camera mode, the system will automatically capture the image once the object is sufficiently detected along with an option to capture the image of the object manually. To increase the accuracy, a novel approach was implemented to ensure the correctness of the extracted text, by adding rectangular boundaries detection to the system. It helps the user to avoid partial capturing of the object which may lead to extracting incomplete sentences. Testing on target users showed high level of satisfaction on the improvement made in the field of assistive application with an overall process being faster in comparison to similar applications in the market.