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Embedded Optical Braille Recognition on Tamil Braille System using

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V Ajantha Devi et al, Int.J.Computer Technology & Applications,Vol 5 (4),1566-1574

Embedded Optical Braille Recognition on Tamil Braille System

using Raspberry Pi
1
Capt.Dr.S Santhosh Baboo, Associate Professor
2
V.Ajantha Devi, Ph.D Research Scholar

P.G.& Research Dept of Computer Science

D.G.Vaishnav College,
Chennai Tamilnadu, India.
1
santhos1968@gmail.com
2
ajay_press@rediffmail.com

Abstract

Optical Braille recognition is used to digitize and
reproduce texts that have been produced with non-
computerized systems, such as with Braille
typewriters. Digitizing Braille texts also helps reduce
storage space, as Braille texts take up much more
space than their natural language counterparts.
Editing and Reprinting of Braille document that were
embossed on paper are time consuming and labour
intensive. Optical Braille recognition is also useful
for people who cannot read Braille, but need to
access the content of Braille documents. This paper
is on Methodology of a camera based assistive device
that can be used by people to read Braille document.
The framework is on implementing image capturing
technique in an embedded system based on
Raspberry Pi board.
1. Introduction
The Braille system is a method that is used by
visually impaired people to read and write which is
invented in 1825 by Louis Braille. The preferred
means of communication for a visually impaired is
through Tactile Braille system, where Tactile means
sense by touching or rubbing the surface of the
corresponding output device.
With the invention of computers, several
approaches to computerized Braille translation have
been developed and thus this makes computerized
Braille[26] is a recently new phenomenon with the
Braille script. Many applications have been created
for translation from Braille to Speech. However,
there is a shortage of programs designed for Tamil
Braille.
The written communications barrier between sighted
and visually impaired persons is particularly apparent
in the schooling system, where, nowadays, visually
impaired students are taught in mainstream classes.
Many of these students perform assessment, tests and
homework writing using the Braille system.
However, most staff of these students are not Braille
literate. Problems also exist in the workplace where
any information written by a Braille user that is to be
interpreted by other Braille illiterate persons, needs to
be first translated by the Braille user.
To overcome this communications barrier, the
device developed in this project provides a means by
which Braille illiterate persons can read what a
Braille user has written. The device is essentially a
hand held scanner that capture the image of the Tamil
Braille and converts into equivalent decoded Tamil
text which is capable of doing the extraction[24] of
Tamil Braille Character from a Braille document
followed by decoding them into Tamil Characters
and then the decoded characters are normalized to
Tamil text are also then converted into audio output.
2. Tamil Braille System
The Braille system[9] comprises of a “cell” per
character and these themselves consist of six
embossed or raised dots arranged in a rectangle
containing two columns of three dots each as shown
in Figure 1. A dot may be raised at any of the six
positions to form 2 6 (64) combinations (including the
combination in which no dots are raised). For
reference purposes, a particular combination may be
described by naming the positions where dots are
raised, the positions being universally numbered 1

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through 3 from top to bottom on the left, and 4
through 6 from top to bottom on the right.
Figure 1. Braille cell
The Braille code system has become widely used by
several communities because of its simplicity,
comfortable for blinds to use it when read and write.
Braille was applied or translated into several
languages including Tamil language[16].
Figure 2. Tamil Braille cell[1]
Tamil alphabet has descended from the Brahmi
script of ancient India. It is a syllabic language which
contains 12 vowels and 18 consonants in its script.
The vowels and consonants combine to form 216
compound characters, as this combination turns out
be in big number, two Braille cells are needed to
represent these combination. Thus only 38 cells have
been assigned for Tamil Braille as shown in Figure 2.
3. System Hardware Design
The whole system is composed by following parts:
an image capturing camera[27][35], Raspberry Pi
board to run image recognition programs on it and a
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Headphone to deliver the output speech. The system
block diagram is shown in Figure 3.
Figure 3. System Hardware Block Diagram
A. Raspberry pi
The Raspberry Pi[20] is a credit card sized
single-board computer developed in the UK by the
Raspberry Pi Foundation with the intention of
stimulating the teaching of basic computer science in
schools. Raspberry Pi contains a comprehensive
amount of features packed in a very reasonable price.
Raspberry Pi is constructed for Broadcom's
BCM2835 system around the circuit, which includes
a 700 MHz ARM11 family processor and include
250 MHz clock -frequency Broadcom's Video
Graphics Core IV. Memory B-model is 512 MB, and
it is divided into the graphics card.
Figure 4. View of Working Hardware system
B. Raspberry pi Camera
The camera module used in this project is
Raspberry PI NOIR (No IR) CAMERA BOARD[19]
as shown in the Figure 5. The camera plugs directly
into the Camera Serial Interface (CSI) connector on
the Raspberry Pi. It‟s able to deliver clear 5MP
resolution image, or 1080p HD video recording at
30fps. The module attaches to Raspberry Pi, by way
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of a 15 pin Ribbon Cable, to the dedicated 15 pin
MIPI CSI, which was designed especially for
interfacing to cameras. The CSI bus is capable of
extremely high data rates, and it exclusively carries
pixel data to the BCM2835 processor.
C. Enabling the camera
Open the raspi-config tool from the Terminal:
sudo raspi-config
1. Select Enable camera and hit Enter,
2. then go to Finish and you'll be prompted to
reboot.
Figure 5. Raspberry PI NOIR (No IR) CAMERA
BOARD
This camera board which has no infrared filter
making it perfect for taking infrared photographs or
photographing objects in low light (twilight)
conditions. Other features of this camera board are
Automatic image control functions Programmable
controls for frame rate 32 bytes of embedded one
time programmable (OTP) memory and Digital video
port (DVP) parallel output interface Excellent
D. Take a picture
The following code will take a single picture and
save it to 'foo.jpg'.
import time
import picamera
with picamera.PiCamera() as camera:
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camera.resolution = (1024, 768)
camera.start_preview()
# Camera warm-up time
time.sleep(2)
camera.capture('foo.jpg
E. Storage (Memory)
The design does not include a built in hard disk or
solid state drive, instead relying on an SD card for
booting and long term storage. This board is intended
to run Linux kernel based operating systems. This
Raspberry Pi module has a Samsung class 4 micro
SD card preloaded with the official Raspberry Pi
NOOBS (New Out of Box Software) package, and a
beautifully screen printed Micro SD card adaptor.
The system designed can be operated in two sessions,
ie one for capturing and creating a data base and the
other session is to capture the image and which can
be used for identifying or comparing the images in
the database.
4. System Software Design
The system that is able to translate a Braille script
into Tamil script and represents the converted script
as text or voice to the user passes through several
stages including image capturing or scanning,
converting the Image to Gray Level, image
Thresholding (converting it to binary), de-skewing
the image, edging the Braille dots, filling Braille dots,
opening the image by removing all micro scale
objects, cropping the cell frames, cropping the dot
frames from cell frames, generating binary equivalent
of activated Braille dots, generating equivalent
decimal Braille code, apply matching algorithm to
Braille frames, get equivalent text and voice file of
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matched Braille cell[28] stored in database.

Figure 7. scanned test image

ii) Converting the Image to Gray Level

Inside a computer system, colored images
are stored in 3-D arrays while gray level images are
stored in 2-D arrays. Dealing with 2-D arrays is much
easier and faster.

Figure 8. Gray level of Figure 7

Figure 6. System Software Block Diagram
Therefore, the first step in the proposed
Braille document is a page that written using system converts colour scanned images to gray level
Braille alphabets. In this project the design based on so that any pixel value in the image falls within the
standard specification of Tamil Braille writing, so to range 0- 255 .
make sure that the Braille page which used in
implementation will meet the standards iii) Cropping the Image Frame
specifications. The scanned images suffer from having
either black or white frames that would affect the
The test image has captured by using Raspberry thresholding step coming next. It is a must that those
PI NOIR (No IR) CAMERA BOARD and the image frames are cropped before proceeding forward. To do
store in JPEG format. that, the average gray level is calculated for the
whole image and then for each of the rows and
columns separately. Finding a row or column average
i) Image pre-processing gray level that is above or below 15% of the whole
Gray scale and binary conversion: Gray scale and image average gray level is an indication to delete it
binary conversion using rgb2gray and im2bw matlab as experiences have shown.
functions
iv) Image Thresholding

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An algorithm was developed to handle the
thresholding[33]. This algorithm works as follows;
after converting the image to gray level and removing
highest and lowest values to leave out distinct values,
the average gray level for the whole image[25] is
calculated.
Figure 9 Image after adaptive thresholding
v) Image De-Skewing
Thus a binary search algorithm was
developed to correct any de-skewing in tilted scanned
images like Figure 10. The maximum degree of
recognizing a de-skewed image is 4 degrees from
either the left or the right side.
Figure 10. Crop effect on skewed image
Figure 11. Crop effect on skewed Braille image
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Figure 12. Finding the deviation degree level
Crop effect on skewed Braille[29] image as
in Figure 11 evaluated. After determining the
deviation degree as in Figure 12, rotate the original
gray image and then Horizontal projection is
performed to count the number of pixels in each row
for the selected part in the previous step. Then the
rows having more than 10 pixel points was
calculated.
Figure 13. Cropping on skewed image
The image is rotated 4 degrees one time to
the left and one to the right for the rotated image as
by Figure 13. This is done because if the image is
skewed then cropping may remove some of the
image parts that constitute Braille cells as could be
seen in Figure 14.
Figure 14. Image after croppe and skewed
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vi) Dot Parts Detection
Experiences have shown that detection of Braille dot
[32] parts is better than detection of the whole dot. It
was also proven that the average dot height is 8
pixels. Each dot is composed of a bright and a dark
region with a small space between them. Oyama et al.
[36] detected both the verso [34] (depression) and
recto (Protrusions) Braille dots utilizing shadow
patterns The testing image analyzed by using Single
side Braille Document by computing centroids on
dot[15].
vii) Whole Dot Detection
The framing process[30] to determine the
cells, words and lines in the scanned image based on
standard dimensions of Braille documents , the cell
frame size is known and experimentally recorded as
95X80 pixels in resolution of 200 dpi. Also the dot
size recorded as 20X15 pixels in resolution of 200
dpi.
Figure 15 shows the dots at the end of the search.
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viii) Braille letter recognition and transcription
In this stage of the project the Braille letter
was recognized using matching algorithm to match
each of the input decimal Braille code from an input
processed image with codes of each Tamil letter by
Figure 16. Then the image is converted to its decimal
code representation:
Decimal-Code=b1+b2*2+b3*4+b4*8+b5*16+ b6*32
After recognition process implemented the
recognized letter transcript into equivalent text file
through addressing process to run matched equivalent
files from stored addressed database.
Figure 16. ASCII Code for each cell
ix) Conversion to text
This is the last stage in implementation, the
word recognition process flow through letter
recognition[31] and fill Braille decimal array of
word, to apply matching process with stored
addressed text files of words, then to run equivalent
files from addressed word database
Each Braille character is coded into a six bit
binary number based on the presence or absence of
dots. The presence of a dot is indicated by 1 and its
absence by 0. This step is a simple one to one
mapping from a database containing the binary code
and the letter corresponding to this representation.
x) Text To Speech scope
The scope of this module is initiated with
the conclusion of the receding module of Braille
Recognition. The module performs the task of
conversion of the transformed Tamil text to audible
form.
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The Raspberry Pi has an on-board audio

jack, the on-board audio is generated by a PWM
output and is minimally filtered. a USB audio card
can greatly improve the sound quality and volume.
Two options of attaching a microphone into
Raspberry Pi. One is to have USB mic, another to
have an external USB sound card.
To enable USB audio output, load the sound driver: Figure 18. Text conversion of the Figure 17

sudo modprobe snd_bcm2835

Enable USB audio output by default

sudo nano /etc/asound.conf

To playback: aplay test.wav

To adjust some volumes: alsamixer

5. Experimental Analysis
Figure 19. Braille image of a tilted document
The methodology used in this paper is
analysised by using the Tamil Braille System on
Thirukural Braille Book. Tirukkural is a classic
Tamil sangam literature consisting of 1330 couplets
or Kurals. It was authored by a Jain ascetic
Thiruvalluvar, a poet who is said to have lived
anytime between 2nd century BCE and 5th century
CE. This particularly apparent in the schooling
system. Following are the snapshots on result of the
analysis.

A couplet or Kural consists of seven cirs, with

four cirs on the first line and three on the second. A Figure 20. Text conversion of the Figure 19
cir is a single or a combination of more than one
Tamil word. For example, Thirukkural is a cir
formed by combining the two words Thiru and
Kural, i.e. Thiru + Kural = Thirukkural

Figure 21. Thirukural in 3 lines

The standard form of thirukural, couplet or

Kural consists of seven cirs, with four cirs on the
first line and three on the second. When embossed in
Braille format if the space in not sufficient for the
forth word in the first line, it is embossed in second
Figure 17. Braille image of 1st Kural
line as shown in the Figure 21 underline in blue and

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the three cirs in the second line be embossed in the
third line.
The Final process of the above methodology [6]
is complete as the above text is synthesized and
converted in to audio format and played using
microphone or mini speaker connecting to on-board [7]
audio jack of Raspberry Pi.
6. Conclusion
Dealing with images in term of image [8]
processing issue it is not an easy task. Adaptive
thresholding technique that has been used to separate
the Braille dots from the background is an effective [9]
technique and it gives a very good result for more
than 90% from the images. Morphology techniques [10]
can help to enhance the image from a noise. The
captured image always has a skew angle (or the
image has a rotated angle in 3rd axis). [11]
Braille has been developed as the reading
and writing system for the visually impaired. The
attention was given on this is very difficult to teach a
visually impaired people in the early stage and more [12]
training is needed for teaching them and converting
Braille to text, is costly and cumbersome work.
[13]
7. Acknowledgment
[14]
The author wish to thank the Christian
Foundation for the Blind- India, Chennai for the
support. The above paper is part of UGC Major [15]
Research Project of the Principal Investigator
Capt.Dr.S Santhosh Baboo
[16]
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