Optical Braille Translator for Sinhala Braille System: Paper Communication Tool Between Vision Impaired and Sighted Persons

Abstract

In this paper we proposed a system; Optical Braille Translator (OBT), that identify Sinhala Braille characters in single sided Braille document and translates to Sinhala language. This system also capable of identifying Grade1 English Braille characters, numbers, capital letters and some words in Grade 2 English Braille system. Image processing techniques were used to developed the proposed system in MATLAB environment. The translated text displayed in a word application as the final outcome. Performance evaluation results reflect that the proposed method can recognize Braille characters and translated to user selected language either Sinhala or English efficiently, over 99% of accuracy.

Keywords: Braille, Braille Recognition, Image Processing, Optical Recognition, Sinhala