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Assistive Text Reading from Complex Background for Blind Persons

  • Conference paper
Camera-Based Document Analysis and Recognition (CBDAR 2011)

Part of the book series: Lecture Notes in Computer Science ((LNIP,volume 7139))

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Abstract

In the paper, we propose a camera-based assistive system for visually impaired or blind persons to read text from signage and objects that are held in the hand. The system is able to read text from complex backgrounds and then communicate this information aurally. To localize text regions in images with complex backgrounds, we design a novel text localization algorithm by learning gradient features of stroke orientations and distributions of edge pixels in an Adaboost model. Text characters in the localized regions are recognized by off-the-shelf optical character recognition (OCR) software and transformed into speech outputs. The performance of the proposed system is evaluated on ICDAR 2003 Robust Reading Dataset. Experimental results demonstrate that our algorithm outperforms previous algorithms on some measures. Our prototype system was further evaluated on a dataset collected by 10 blind persons, with the system effectively reading text from complex backgrounds.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Media Lab, Dept. of Electrical Engeering, The City College of New York, City Univ. of New York, 160 Convent Avenue, New York, NY, USA, 10031

    Chucai Yi & Yingli Tian

  2. Dept. of Computer Science, The Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY, USA, 10016

    Chucai Yi & Yingli Tian

Authors
  1. Chucai Yi
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  2. Yingli Tian
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Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Engineering, Dept. of Computer Science and Intelligent Systems, Osaka Prefecture University, 1-1 Gakuencho, Naka Sakai, 599-8531, Osaka, Japan

    Masakazu Iwamura

  2. German Research Center for Artificial Intelligence, Multimedia Analysis and Data Mining Competence Center, Trippstadter Str. 122, 67663, Kaiserslautern, Germany

    Faisal Shafait

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© 2012 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg

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Yi, C., Tian, Y. (2012). Assistive Text Reading from Complex Background for Blind Persons. In: Iwamura, M., Shafait, F. (eds) Camera-Based Document Analysis and Recognition. CBDAR 2011. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7139. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29364-1_2

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-29364-1_2

  • Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-642-29363-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-642-29364-1

  • eBook Packages: Computer ScienceComputer Science (R0)

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