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

Abstract

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.