MT3S: Mobile Turkish Scene Text-to-Speech System for the Visually Impaired
This addresses the need for accessible text reading for visually impaired people, though it is incremental as it builds on existing methods like Tesseract OCR.
The researchers tackled the problem of reading text for visually impaired individuals by developing a mobile system for Turkish scene and book text, achieving comparable OCR accuracy to state-of-the-art systems while being much faster and operable on mobile devices.
Reading text is one of the essential needs of the visually impaired people. We developed a mobile system that can read Turkish scene and book text, using a fast gradient-based multi-scale text detection algorithm for real-time operation and Tesseract OCR engine for character recognition. We evaluated the OCR accuracy and running time of our system on a new, publicly available mobile Turkish scene text dataset we constructed and also compared with state-of-the-art systems. Our system proved to be much faster, able to run on a mobile device, with OCR accuracy comparable to the state-of-the-art.