Jo Feb 24, 2022

The research group led by Ma Min Gon, vice dean of the Faculty of Information Science and Technology, has developed a Korean braille character reader which converts raised letters read by an image input device into a character code readable by ordinary people.

When books published in raised type for the blind to read by groping are read by an image input device like a scanner, the raised parts are shown in dim dots.

In order to extract these dim dots more precisely, they proposed and realized several new basic methods: binarization by wavelet difference image, tilt estimation by Hough conversion, dot extraction by dot database and Maharanobis distance for precise extraction without being affected by the scanning direction, charline extraction from dots capable of strongly overcoming noises, substitution of braille code for unicode by bidirection scanning, postprocess based on geometrical position of dots, etc.

Thus, they were able to raise the extraction precision up to 96% and the recognition speed up to 1 second per page.