Bangla Optical Character Recognition and Text-to-Speech Conversion using Raspberry Pi

Abstract

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology is very helpful for visually impaired or illiterate persons who are unable to read text documents but need to reach the content of the text documents. In this paper, a camera-based assistive device is used that can be applied for visually impaired or illiterate people to understand Bangla text documents by listening to the contents of the Bangla text images. This work mainly involves the extraction of the Bangla text from the Bangla text image and converts the extracted text to speech. This work has been fulfilled with Raspberry Pi and a camera module by applying the concepts of the Tesseract OCR engine, the Open Source Computer Vision, and the Google Speech Application Program Interface. This work can help people speaking Bangla language who are unable to read or have a significant loss of visual sight.