An Assistive Reading System for Visually Impaired using OCR and TTS

Reading machines are mechatronic devices which use optical character recognition and text-to-speech technology in order to output synthetic voice from printed text. In this paper an assistive system has been proposed for visually impaired or blind persons. It reads textual information on papers and produces corresponding voice using OCR (Optical Character Recognition)and TTS (Text-to-speech) system. To localize text regions in images connected component labeling approach using histogram analysis is done on binarized image. TTS system using Concatenative synthesis based on SDK (Software Development Kit) platform is used. This system is operated via a voice-based user interface and also has a user friendly GUI (graphical user interface) to scan the text and to control various speech parameters. Speech signal produced can be saved and reproduced for later use.

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