Project Info
Phone Reader is developed at Department of Computer Science, Western Cape University by Hossein and Hadi Shayesteh and under supervision of Mr James Connan.
Phone reader , takes advantage of two major technologies called as OCR and TTS. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) is used for image to text conversion and Text to Speech (TTS) is used for text to speech conversion .
OCR
OCR is a technology that enables the user you to convert different types of documents, such as scanned paper documents, PDF files or images captured by a digital camera into a text file that can be edited using different word processing applications such as MS word..
TTS
A TTS system enables the applications to converts normal language text into speech. A TTS system (or "engine") is composed of two parts: a front-end and a back-end. The front-end has two major tasks. First, it converts raw text containing symbols like numbers and abbreviations into the equivalent of written-out words. This process is often called text normalization, pre-processing, or tokenization. The front-end then assigns phonetic transcriptions to each word, and divides and marks the text into prosodic units, like phrases, clauses, and sentences . Process of assigning phonetic transcriptions to words is called text-to-phoneme or grapheme-to-phoneme conversion. Phonetic transcriptions and prosody information together make up the symbolic linguistic representation that is output by the front-end. The back-end often referred to as the synthesizer, then converts the symbolic linguistic representation into sound.
Phone Reader's overall architecture
This is the overall architecture of phone reader. Phone Reader needs Android OS powered device and a server computer. The server could be accessible through various forms of wireless connections such as Wi-Fi, 3G, GPRS and etc. The captured image is sent to the server. OCR engine on the server processes the image and extracts the readable parts of the image and stores them into a text file. The file is then sent to the TTS engine on the phone. TTS engine then processes the text and reads out the text.
Potential Users
Phone Reader is mainly intended to help the people with reading difficulties such as illiterate, blind and visually impaired people in reading the various types of texts.