A pen with optical text recognition that reads text aloud ... potentially helping the visually impaired
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Obstacles
Obviously, there's a lot more than that. Consider this the first stage of the project.
Unfortunately the project stopped a while ago, since it was simply too difficult to get reliable data from the mouse sensor. The sensor did not seem to be able to see text even with different lighting configurations. Should anyone wish to do something similar to this project, I suggest they use an actual camera sensor.
Recently I've discovered that pen-like products already exist in the market that perform OCR. So the foundations are already there. What in fact needs to be implemented now is some way for the pen to communicate to the user physically. I've had recommendations from friends to use some sort of mechanical system on the pen that creates braille physically on the pen. After research, I have discovered that braille characters can pretty much be represented by a 3x2 matrix. Thus, only 6 physically on/off pins need to be mechanically made. Nevertheless, this is still a rather daunting task and I'm sure their are flaws to the idea.
For now I'll be working on my new project: the ballbot.
A typical computer mouse has the sensor elevated at just the right height. For the ADNS-9800, this is approximately, this is approximately 2.4mm. HOWEVER this is not a concern for our application as we aren't detecting the small particles of the surface. Instead, it's important to position the sensor at exactly the right distance so that individual letters are captured on the camera. As a result, the "pen" may look less like a normal "pen" but instead a tubular device that needs to be in contact with the paper.
So I started the project today, hoping to get the camera showing some images of text on the computer. I succeeded ... partly. The camera seems to struggle with differentiating between anything but extremely bright and dark objects. In the end, I was only able to recognise bright sources of light (such as the ceiling light) as pictured below.
(instead of writing a proper application for showing shades, I decided to just send different ASCII characters over serial).
I've also tried with and without the lens, and it seems that removing the lens gives better results.
As in processing power to perform the OCR? Good question. This is something something that can really only be found out once I get to that stage. Using very simple methods for OCR would that would be least computationally expensive comes to mind, though this may be a tradeoff for text recognition reliability. Even that might not be possible
Brian Chen
DeepSOIC
Jacob David C Cunningham
How to you get the processing speeds to process the data though.