Journal of Optical Communication Electronics

Volume 5 Issue 3

Raspberry PI Based Reader for Blind

Liya George1*, Rinsila Salim1, Riya Baby1, Anitta Thomas2
1
Student, 2Assistant Professor
Department of Electronics and Communication Engineering, Viswajyothi College of Engineering and
Technology, Vazhakulam, Kerala, India
Email: *liyageorgealucka@gmail.com
DOI: http://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3570357

Abstract
This project is an automatic document reader for visually impaired people, developed on the
Raspberry Pi processor board. It controls the peripherals like camera, a speaker which act as
an interface between the system and the user. Optical character recognition (OCR)
technology is used for the identification of the printed characters using image sensing devices
and computer programming. The OCR process is done using online and offline methods. It
converts images of typed or printed text into machine-encoded text. These encoded texts are
then converted into the audio output (Speech).Raspberry Pi is used for the translation of
printed document into data files using Tesseract library and Python programming. These
data files are then computed by OpenCV library and Python programming language to get
the audio output.

Keywords: Google cloud vision, optical character recognition, OpenCV, tesseract

INTRODUCTION people. OCR and Text-to-Speech synthesis

There are many existing solutions to the
problem of assisting individuals who are
blind to read, however, none of them
provide an efficient reading. We focus on
improving the competence of blind people
by providing them with a solution where
the details are given in the form of audio
signal. Raspberry Pi-Based Reader is an
automatic document reader for visually
impaired people using OCR technology.
The proposed project uses a camera-based
assistive device which can be used by
individuals to read printed text. The
scheme is to implement an embedded
system based image capturing technique
using Raspberry Pi board. The design is
inspired by prior research with visually
impaired people, and it is small and
portable, that helps in achieving result in
little setup. Here, we have put forward a
text read out system for visually impaired
is used to convert images into audio output
(Speech). The proposed apparatus has a
camera which act as the input device for
digitization and this digitized script is
processed by OCR (software module). A
procedure is followed for recognition of
characters and the line of reading. In the
context of software development, the Open
CV (Open source Computer Vision)
libraries are employed to capture image of
text and character recognition. The final
identified text document is given to the
output devices based on the choice of the
user. Headset connected to the Raspberry
Pi or a speaker act as the output device.
LITERATURE SURVEY
Ray Kurzweil [1] proposes K-Reader
Mobiles, specially designed movable
reading assistant for visually impaired
people. "K-Reader Mobile" runs on cell

11 Page 11-16 © MAT Journals 2019. All Rights Reserved


phone and allows the user to read mail and
many other documents. But this fails to
give an economical solution.
Athira Panicker [2] proposes a smart
shopping assistant label reading system
with voice output for the blind using the
raspberry pi. This system only reads
documents from clear flat surface and it
does not read from complex backgrounds.
Marut Tripathi [3] proposes a Navigation
System for blind people to navigate safely
and quickly. In the system, ultrasonic
sensors and USB camera are used to detect
and recognize obstacles. Once the
obstacles detected via ultrasonic sensors, it
sends feedback in the form of beep sound
through an earphone to inform the person
about the hindrance.
Dimitrios Dakopoulos [4] proposes a
Wearable Obstacle Avoidance Electronic
Travel Aids for Blind that presents a
comparative survey among portable or
wearable obstacle detection or avoidance
systems to aware users about the progress
in assistive technology for blind people.
X. Chen [5] proposes Automatic Detection
and Recognition of signs from natural
scenes, here they presented with an
approach for automatic detection and
identification of signs from natural scenes
and it's given to a sign translation task. The
system fails because it works only in the
Chinese language.
William A Ainsworth [6] proposes a
system for converting English text into
speech using an inexpensive computer but
it is not suitable for all memory range of
computers as only small amount of stored
data has scrutinized.
Michael McEnancy [7] Finger Reader is an
audio reading gadget for Index Finger.
Even Though this system doesn't help
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Journal of Optical Communication Electronics
Volume 5 Issue 3
blind people to aim the letters accurately,
finger-worn device assists the visually
impaired in reading the paper-printed text.
Vasanthi G [8] proposes a Vision Based
Assistive System for Label Detection with
Voice Output. This camera-based assistive
system help blind persons read text labels
and product packaging from a hand-held
object.
BLOCK DIAGRAM OF PROPOSED
METHOD
The proposed project is implemented on
the raspberry pi 3 board. The raspberry pi
3 is a mini computer, it consists of 4 USB
ports, 40 GPIO pins for input or output,
CSI camera interface, full HDMI port, DSI
display interface, SOC (system on a chip),
LAN controller, micro SD card slot,
Bluetooth 4.1, audio jack, and video
socket, 5V micro USB connector and
Ethernet port.
Fig. 1 shows the block diagram of
raspberry pi based blind reader. It consists
of raspberry pi 3, battery, camera, press
button, headset. Raspberry Pi is the control
unit which controls the entire system. A
battery of 9V is use as the power source
which turns on camera for capturing the
image. Press button is used to activate the
program and headset for audio output. The
printed text is to be placed under the
camera to ensure the image of good quality
and fewer distortions. Then an applicable
blind-assistive system, an algorithm might
prefer. It checks the availability of all the
devices and also for the connection, when
the applications starts. Raspberry Pi 3 uses
a Linux based operating system named
Raspbian. The first part is booting the
Raspberry Pi board by installing the
Operating system Raspbian OS and
installing the essential libraries and
packages.

Figure 1: Block diagram of the proposed system.
Next is the image acquisition system, in
which we have interfaced a camera, to
capture the image of the text document.
The data is transfer to the OCR algorithm
which converts the image data to text data.
The OCR algorithm scans the image and
checks each alphabet or letter. Then it
gives a corresponding text output after
verifying it with its database. We can use a
dictionary to compare the words detected
by the algorithm for auto-correction. We
have chosen text to speech engine which
convert the text data to an audio output and
is plays through the earphones connected
to the audio jack.
ARCHITECTURE OF THE
PROPOSED SYSTEM
The proposed system has the hardware and
software part.
Hardware Implementation
The hardware parts of the system include
the Raspberry Pi Battery, Camera, Press
Button, and Headset.
Raspberry Pi
It is a credit card sized minicomputer that
plugs into a computer monitor or TV and it
uses standard keyboard and mouse.
Raspberry Pi 2 and Raspberry Pi 3 are the
2 models of Raspberry Pi. The hardware
components of the Raspberry Pi include 4
USB ports,40 GPIO pins for input or
output, CSI camera interface, full HDMI
port, DSI display interface, SOC (system
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Journal of Optical Communication Electronics
Volume 5 Issue 3
on a chip), LAN controller, micro SD card
slot, Bluetooth 4.1, audio jack, and video
socket, 5V micro USB connector and
Ethernet port, power supply. Power Supply
Unit supplies electrical energy to the
output loads. In real time the camera feeds
its images to a computer or computer
network, often via USB, Ethernet or Wi-
Fi. The Raspberry Pi board is connected to
the Projectors, Monitors and TV through a
HDMI to VGA Converter.
Raspbian being a free operating system
based on Debian developed for the
Raspberry Pi module. The operating
system is a set of basic programs and
services that helps the Raspberry Pi run.
Many versions of Raspbian are available
like Raspbian Stretch and Raspbian Jessie.
As of the latest update Raspbian uses
PIXEL, Pi Improved X-Window
Environment, and Lightweight as its
fundamental desktop environment.
Python 3.7
Figure 2: Raspberry Pi.

Battery
Python is a high-level programming
language for general-purpose. Design
ideology of python emphasizes on code
readability, notably using significant
whitespace. It provides clear programming
on both large and small scales. Python
features a dynamic type system and
automatic management. It supports
multiple programming paradigms,
including object-oriented, procedural, and
has a large and comprehensive standard
library.
9V 1.2Ah Battery is use for power supply.
The Larson Electronics BATT-9V-10PK is
a ten pack of 9V 1.2Ah batteries. These
high-energy batteries feature up to 10
times more than carbon zinc battery and up
to 5 times more energy than alkaline
battery. This is a long lasting battery,
because of the high running voltage, low
impedance, better performance at low
temperatures, wide operating temperature
range and advanced safety features. This is
a lightweight battery which is alternative
to any comparable 9V battery.
Press Button
A press-button or simply button is a simple
switch mechanism for controlling some
aspect of a machine or a process. Press
button is used to activate the program and
headset for audio output. Press Buttons are
typically made out of very hard materials
like plastic or metal. The surface of button
is usually flat or shaped to accommodate
the human finger. So it can be easily
depressed or pushed.
Headset
A headset combines a headphone with a
microphone. Headsets are setup with either
a single-earpiece (mono) or a double-
earpiece (mono to both ears or stereo).The
audio output is plays through the
earphones connected to the audio jack.
Headsets is also provide the equivalent
functionality of a telephone handset but
with hand free operation.
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Journal of Optical Communication Electronics
Volume 5 Issue 3
Software Implementation
This includes the programming part of the
project.
Raspbian
Open CV
OpenCV is an open source library for
programs and functions mainly aimed at
real-time computer vision. Initially
developed by Intel, and later taken up by
Willow Garage then Itseez and again
acquired back by Intel. Under open-source
license it’s free for the users and the
library is cross platform. OpenCV supports
the deep learning frameworks TensorFlow,
Torch/PyTorch and Caffe.
Flite
Speech synthesis is the imitation of human
voice. A computer system used for this
task is called a speech synthesizer. This
synthesizer is accessible to all in hardware
or software products. The foremost aim of
Text-To-Speech system is to translate
normal language text into audio.
Synthesized speech can be produced by
concatenating pieces of recorded speech
that are stored in a database. A system
which stores phones or diaphones provides
the largest output range, but this may give
low clarity. For specific application
domains, the storage of entire words or
sentences allows for high-quality output.
Alternatively, a synthesizer can constitute
a model of the vocal tract and other human
voice characteristics to create a fully
synthetic voice output. The quality of a
speech synthesizer is decided by its
naturalness or similarity to the human
voice and by its ability to be understood
clearly.
FLOW OF PROCESS
Image Capturing
Image capturing is the first step. It is
achieved by using the press button
interfaced to the Pi. To improve the quality
of the image high resolution camera is
used.

Figure 3: Flow of process.
done using Flite algorithm. The final audio
output is heard using a headset.
RESULT
Image is captured and processed using
OCR technology and Google Cloud
Vision. Text to speech conversion is done
using flite algorithm.
Character Recognition
The captured image is first enhanced, and
character recognition is done either by
online or offline methods. In the offline
method, Tesseract library and Python
programming are used. Here the text files
are processed by various libraries like
OpenCV, NumPy. In the online method,
Google Cloud Vision is used.
CONCLUSION
Figure 4: Result.
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Journal of Optical Communication Electronics
Volume 5 Issue 3
Dictionary
The recognized characters are cross-
checked with the database provided. The
database used for the online process is
taken from the cloud library whereas for
offline we use a trained dataset.
Image to Text Conversion
Here, the image is converted to machine-
encoded text. In the online process, we use
the Google cloud vision as the platform for
the conversion where Application Program
Interface (API) is used.
Speech Synthesis
This module performs the task of
conversion of the transformed machine-
encoded text to the audible form. It is here,
we represented a system to scan written
text, for helping the blind individuals.
Word recognition on the text regions is
performed using OCR. For this
methodology the camera acts as the input.
As the Raspberry PI board is high powered
it makes the camera streaming. The image
is captured by pressing the button when
the item for text reading is positioned
ahead of the camera. The image is
converted to the document using Tesseract
library. Text-to-Speech synthesis is used to
pronounce the document through the ear
phones.
Additional features can be added to the
system for obstacle detection using
ultrasonic sensors.
REFERENCES
1. Ray Kurzweil (2008), “K-Reader
mobile user guide”, Knfb Reading
Technology Inc.
2. Ms. Athira Panicker, Ms. Anupama
Pandey, Ms.Vrunal Patil YTIET (Oct
2016), “Smart shopping assistant
label reading system with voice
output using Raspberry Pi”,
University of Mumbai, IJARCET,
Volume 5, Issue 10, ISSN: 2278-
1323.
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Volume 5 Issue 3

3. Marut Tripathi, Manish Kumar, 1,

Vivek Kumar, Warsha Kandlikar (Jul-
Aug 2014), “A navigation system for
blind people”, IJRASET, Volume 2,
Issue 4,
4. Dimitrios Dakopoulos, Nikolas G
Bourbakis (Jan 2010), “Wearable
obstacle avoidance electronic travel
aids for blind”, IEEE Transactions on
systems, man and cybemetics,
Volume 40, Issue 1,
5. Xilin Chen, Jie Yang, Jing Zhang,
Alex Waibel (Jan 2004), “Automatic
detection and recognition of signs
from natural sceneries transactions on
image processing”, Volume 13, Issue
6. William A Ainsworth (Jun 1973), “A
System for converting English text
into Speech”, IEEE Transactions on
Audio and Electroacoustic, Volume
21, Issue 3,
7. Michael McEnancy (July 2014),
“Finger Reader is audio reading
gadget for Index Finger”, IJECCE,
Volume 5, Issue 4,
8. Vsanthi G, Ramesh Babu (Jan 2014),
“Vision based assistive system for
label detection with voice output”,
Dept. Of ECE, DMI College of
Engineering, Chennai.

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