Advance Text and Product Label Reading from Hand-Held Objects for Blind Persons Using Portable Camera

Abstract

We propose a camera-based assistive text reading framework to help blind persons read text labels and product packaging from hand-held objects in their daily lives. To isolate the object from cluttered backgrounds or other surrounding objects in the camera view, we first propose an efficient and effective motion based method to define a region of interest (ROI) in the video by asking the user to shake the object. This method extracts moving object region by a mixture-of-Gaussians-based background subtraction method. In the extracted ROI, text localization and recognition are conducted to acquire text information.

Index Terms—Assistive devices; blindness; distribution of edge pixels; hand-held objects; optical character recognition (OCR); stroke orientation; text reading; text region localization