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A Multifunctional Reading Assistant for the Visually Impaired

EURASIP Journal on Image and Video Processing volume 2007, Article number: 064295 (2007) Cite this article

Abstract

In the growing market of camera phones, new applications for the visually impaired are nowadays being developed thanks to the increasing capabilities of these equipments. The need to access to text is of primary importance for those people in a society driven by information. To meet this need, our project objective was to develop a multifunctional reading assistant for blind community. The main functionality is the recognition of text in mobile situations but the system can also deal with several specific recognition requests such as banknotes or objects through labels. In this paper, the major challenge is to fully meet user requirements taking into account their disability and some limitations of hardware such as poor resolution, blur, and uneven lighting. For these applications, it is necessary to take a satisfactory picture, which may be challenging for some users. Hence, this point has also been considered by proposing a training tutorial based on image processing methods as well. Developed in a user-centered design, text reading applications are described along with detailed results performed on databases mostly acquired by visually impaired users.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Circuit Theory and Signal Processing Laboratory, Faculty of Engineering of Mons, Mons, 7000, Belgium

    Céline Mancas-Thillou, Silvio Ferreira, Jonathan Demeyer & Bernard Gosselin

  2. Microgravity Research Center, The Free University of Brussels, Brussels, 1050, Belgium

    Christophe Minetti

Authors
  1. Céline Mancas-Thillou
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  2. Silvio Ferreira
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  3. Jonathan Demeyer
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  4. Christophe Minetti
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  5. Bernard Gosselin
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Céline Mancas-Thillou.

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Open Access This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 International License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Mancas-Thillou, C., Ferreira, S., Demeyer, J. et al. A Multifunctional Reading Assistant for the Visually Impaired. J Image Video Proc 2007, 064295 (2007). https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/64295

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1155/2007/64295

Keywords

  • Image Processing
  • Computer Vision
  • Detailed Result
  • User Requirement
  • Specific Recognition