Assisting visually challenged person in the library environment

Abstract

Nowadays, there is lot of assistive technologies to support visually impaired people. Among them computer vision based methods provide a feasible solution. An indoor environment provides challenges like object recognition, character and scene recognition. It is important to understand that people need to know information about things; places and they may feel insecure in places like their working places, shopping mall because of their challenges in vision. It is essential that a technology based solution can be provided to support the people so that they can be guided along in their pathways, rooms, shopping malls and they can also access things in their living environment. In this paper a model is proposed for detecting text from library book shelf scene video and informing the user about book name through audio to assist visually impaired people in accessing their book which is kept on shelf in library. Key frames are extracted using PSNR and Edge Change Ratio method. Text on the key frame is detected and localized using MSER and Projection profiles. CNN is used to recognize characters from the localized text. This paper gives an outline of different techniques which are combined to extract key frames, localize and recognize text from natural library scenes.