Finger-eye: A wearable text reading assistive system for the blind and visually impaired

Liu, Zhiming; Luo, Yudong; Cordero, José María; Zhao, Na; Shen, Yantao

doi:10.1109/rcar.2016.7784012

Cited by 19 publications

(8 citation statements)

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“…Images acquired from the smartphone camera are processed to detect text regions, recognize the text, and synthesize speech in Turkish. Liu et al developed Fingereye, which is a portable and refreshable text reading system and a rapid OCR algorithm with a small camera [9]. The text is recognized to translate as audio or generate corresponding electrotactile stimulation on a visually impaired people's finger.…”

Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Finger-Worn Device for Exploring Chinese Printed Text With Using CNN Algorithm on a Micro IoT Processor

Chou

Chu

et al. 2019

IEEE Access

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This study designed a finger-worn device-named the Chinese FingerReader-that can be practically applied by visually impaired users for recognizing traditional Chinese characters on the micro internet of things (IoT) processor. The device is portable, easy to operate, and designed to be worn on the index finger. The Chinese FingerReader on the index finger contains a small camera and buttons. The small camera captures images by identifying the relative position of the index finger to the printed text, and the buttons are applied to capture an image by visually impaired users and provide the audio output of the corresponding Chinese character by a voice prompt. To recognize Chinese characters, English letters, and numbers, a robust Chinese optical character recognition (OCR) system was developed according to the training strategy of an augmented convolution neural network algorithm. The proposed Chinese OCR system can segment a single character from the captured image, and the system can accurately recognize rotated Chinese characters. The experimental results revealed that compared with the OCR application programming interfaces of Google and Microsoft, the proposed OCR system obtains 95% accuracy rate in dealing with rotated character images where the Google and Microsoft OCR APIs only obtain 65% and 34% accuracy rates. These results illustrate that the proposed OCR system was more suitable for the needs of visually impaired people in actual use. Finally, three usage scenarios were simulated, and the accuracy and operational performance of the system were tested. Field tests of this system were conducted for visually impaired users to verify its feasibility.

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Section: Related Workmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Finger-Worn Device for Exploring Chinese Printed Text With Using CNN Algorithm on a Micro IoT Processor

Chou

Chu

et al. 2019

IEEE Access

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“…For substituting visual with haptic information, Liu et al, (2016) developed the Finger Eye, a wearable text reading assistive system for the blind and visually impaired individuals [88]. In their pilot study, they successfully converted visual data (i.e, text displayed on a screen or paper), which were captured by a Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) camera, into haptic information correspondingly to the braille reading system.…”

Section: Biomedical Applications: Assistive Devicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In their pilot study, they successfully converted visual data (i.e, text displayed on a screen or paper), which were captured by a Pan-Tilt-Zoom (PTZ) camera, into haptic information correspondingly to the braille reading system. Hence, using text recognition, Liu et al, (2016) actually translated conventional text into braille [88]. However, a disadvantage was that the camera was bulky (i.e., normal size of a PTZ camera) which prevents the wearability and portability of such text reading assistive system.…”

Section: Biomedical Applications: Assistive Devicesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Electrotactile feedback applications for hand and arm interactions: A systematic review, meta-analysis, and future directions

Kourtesis¹,

Argelaguet²,

Vizcay³

et al. 2022

Preprint

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<div>Haptic feedback is critical in a broad range of human-machine/computer-interaction applications. However, the high cost and low portability/wearability of haptic devices remains an unresolved issue, severely limiting the adoption of this otherwise promising technology. Electrotactile interfaces have the advantage of being more portable and wearable due to its reduced actuators’ size, as well as benefiting from lower power consumption and manufacturing cost. The usages of electrotactile feedback have been explored in human-computer interaction and human machine-interaction for facilitating hand-based interactions in applications such as prosthetics, virtual reality, robotic teleoperation, surface haptics, portable devices, and rehabilitation. This paper presents a systematic review and meta-analysis of electrotactile feedback systems for hand based interactions in the last decade. We categorize the different electrotactile systems according to their type of stimulation and implementation/application. We also present and discuss a quantitative congregation of the findings, so as to offer a high-level overview into the state-of-art and suggest future directions. Electrotactile feedback was successful in rendering and/or augmenting most tactile sensations, eliciting perceptual processes, and improving performance in many scenarios, especially in those where the wearability/portability of the system is important. However, knowledge gaps, technical drawbacks, and methodological limitations were detected, which should be addressed in future studies.</div>

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“…Unfortunately, many parameters (impedance, conductance and local sensitivity) are subject to temporal and spatial changes and reliable and comfortable stimulation could not easily be achieved [13].…”

Section: Direct Skin Stimulation -No Moving Partsmentioning

confidence: 99%

BrailleRing: The Shortest Long Braille-Display in the World – A Review of the State-of-the-Art and a New Approach

Zagler

Treml²,

Busse³

et al. 2018

Lecture Notes in Computer Science

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Abstract. After paying tribute to the ground-breaking invention of the tactile alphabet by Louis Braille, the paper describes the technological development of so-called refreshable Braille-Displays in significant steps from the late 1970s up till now. Despite quite many R&D efforts over these 40 years, all BrailleDisplays presently available on the market in principle follow the same construction scheme as disclosed by Tetzlaff in 1981: Piezo-electric benders which move small pins up-and down [1]. In order to overcome several drawbacks of the classical solutions, we propose and investigate a radically new approach, where different combinations of rigid tactile points are placed on the surfaces of rotating cuboids which are arranged inside of a rotating cylinder. The lower half of the cylinder resembles the reading area for the finger, whereas a group of a few actuators by rotating said cuboids produces new text-content in the upper half. This can result not only in a complete new way of mobile and reasonably priced Braille reading equipment but also in a revival of Braille worldwide.

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Finger-eye: A wearable text reading assistive system for the blind and visually impaired

Cited by 19 publications

References 1 publication

A Finger-Worn Device for Exploring Chinese Printed Text With Using CNN Algorithm on a Micro IoT Processor

A Finger-Worn Device for Exploring Chinese Printed Text With Using CNN Algorithm on a Micro IoT Processor

Electrotactile feedback applications for hand and arm interactions: A systematic review, meta-analysis, and future directions

BrailleRing: The Shortest Long Braille-Display in the World – A Review of the State-of-the-Art and a New Approach

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