Vision-Based Bus Route Number Reader for Visually Impaired Travelers

Abstract

In this paper, we present vision-based bus route number reader by using machine learning and image processing techniques. This prototype system is designed for people with low vision to recognize bus route number from natural scene images. Our proposed system consists of three stages: Bus panel detection, image enhancement, and bus number recognition. The bus panel detection is done using faster RCNN. The pre-processing is applied to enhance bus panel images. Next, the bus route number is recognized using Google Cloud Vision API. Finally, the recognized bus route number is translated to synthesized audio. The prototype system can be applied to develop a mobile application or embedded system at the bus stop to aid people with low vision when taking the public bus transportation. Experimental results presented in precision, recall and f-measure in bus panel detection stage and obtain 67.9 percent accuracy of bus number recognition.