Pay Voice: Point of Sale Recognition for Visually Impaired People
This work addresses a specific accessibility issue for visually impaired individuals, providing a practical tool for payment verification, but it is incremental as it applies existing technologies like OCR to a new domain.
The paper tackles the problem of enabling visually impaired people to independently verify payment amounts and operations on POS and PIN pad machines by developing a smartphone app that uses image processing, OCR, and voice synthesis, achieving over 80% accuracy and less than 5 seconds processing time in real-world scenarios.
Millions of visually impaired people depend on relatives and friends to perform their everyday tasks. One relevant step towards self-sufficiency is to provide them with means to verify the value and operation presented in payment machines. In this work, we developed and released a smartphone application, named Pay Voice, that uses image processing, optical character recognition (OCR) and voice synthesis to recognize the value and operation presented in POS and PIN pad machines, and thus informing the user with auditive and visual feedback. The proposed approach presented significant results for value and operation recognition, especially for POS, due to the higher display quality. Importantly, we achieved the key performance indicators, namely, more than 80% of accuracy in a real-world scenario, and less than $5$ seconds of processing time for recognition. Pay Voice is publicly available on Google Play and App Store for free.