(a toy) Reading Assistant - online edition

Introduction

The Reading Assistant is a simple program for helping the visually-impaired people to read text in the surrounding scenes. The program captures images using a high resolution USB2.0 camera, recognizes the text characters in the images using an OCR (Optical Character Reader) engine, and produces text output. The current version is an alpha version, and is not equipped with a voice synthesizer. The user needs to find and use a screen reader.

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License

The license is a derivative of the MIT-X license.

  Copyright (C) 2008  Hideaki Goto

  All Rights Reserved.

  Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining
  a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the
  "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including
  without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish,
  distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to
  permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to
  the following conditions:

  The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be
  included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

  THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND,
  EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF
  MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT.
  IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHOR(S) OR COPYRIGHT HOLDER(S) BE LIABLE FOR
  ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF
  CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION
  WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

  Except as contained in this notice, the name(s) of the copyright
  holder(s) shall not be used in advertising or otherwise to promote
  the sale, use or other dealings in this Software without prior
  written authorization of the copyright holder(s).

Using the Reading Assistant

Installation

1. Download the distribution package.
2. Create a new folder somewhere on the hard drive.
3. Unpack the package and copy all files into the folder.

Usage

1. Connect a webcam to the computer.
2. Run hiras.exe in the folder without any option.
3. A message bell will tell you the image capture is ready.
   Press space-key to capture an image and have it recognized. The recognition process can take more than 10 seconds. The time varies depending on the network speed and the server performance.
4. The recognized text lines will be printed on the screen. If you have attached a screen reader, you will ``hear'' the text.
5. Press space-key to capture another image.
6. Press Q-key when you want to stop the program.

Roadmap

The development of a high performance OCR engine for scene text recognition is underway. It will be incorporated into the WeOCR system so the users of the Reading Assistant will benefit from it.

Development of the stand-alone version of Reading Assistant is included in our future work. It could be canceled depending on the shortages of human and financial resources as well as technical difficulties.

Source codes will be open to research partners for a while, and then to the public in the future.

Recent changes

[Aug 15, 2008]

• First release of hiras-bin-0.01.

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