Abstract
Computer Vision Technology has played a significant role in assisting visually challenged people to carry out their day to day activities without much dependency on other people. Smart glasses in one such solution which enables blind or visually challenged people to "read" images. This paper is an attempt in this direction to build a novel smart glass which has the ability to extract and recognize text captured from an image and convert it to speech. It consists of a Raspberry Pi 3 B+ microcontroller which processes the image captured from a webcam super-imposed on the glasses of the blind person. Text detection is achieved using the OpenCV software and open source Optical Character Recognition (OCR) tools Tesseract and Efficient and Accurate Scene Text Detector ( EAST) based on Deep Learning techniques. The recognized text is further processed by Google's Text to Speech (gTTS) API to convert to an audible signal for the user. A second feature of this solution is to provide location-based services to the blind people by identifying locations in an academic building using the RFID technology. This solution has been extensively tested in a university environment for aiding visually challenged students. The novelty of the implemented solution lies in providing the desired computer vision functionalities of image/text recognition which is economical, small-sized, accurate and uses open source software tools. This solution can be potentially used for both educational and commercial applications.