Development of Scanner Machine for the Blinds and Visually Impaired

Abstract

Technological aid in scanner for blind people and visually impaired is still complicated and considered costly. They lost privacy when ask someone to read their documents for them. Therefore, a scanner machine that is cheap, easy to maintain and privacy secured should be developed. This report describes the development of scanner machine which can perform image capture, optical character recognition (OCR), and text to speech audio output. The objectives of this project include to develop a scanner machine, to develop an algorithm for text recognition based on OCR method, to measure the accuracy of text recognition and to measure the average working time of scanner machine. The scope of this project limited the size of scanning materials, limited the language used for text recognition (English), and the output only audio form. The scanner machine prototype is composed of Raspberry Pi 3B+, camera, dc motor, servo motor, speaker/headphone, and switches. The coding or algorithm is running by the Raspberry Pi 3B+ to receive signal from the switches, perform certain operations and send the output in audio form. this scanner machine able to deal with rotated scanning material in range of -90º to 75º with accuracy greater than 80%. When different font size of scanning materials is used, the scanner machine performs well for font size greater than 13 with accuracy above 85%. Besides, the scanner had overall running time of “book” mode at around 16.58 seconds and overall running time of “normal mode” at around 13.39 seconds.