Designing Braille Copier Based on Image Processing Techniques
Abdul Malik S. Al-Salman1, Ali El-Zaart2, Yousef Al-Suhaibani3, Khaled Al-Hokail4, Abdu Gumaei5
1Prof. Abdul Malik S. Al-Salman, Department of Computer Science, King Saud University, Riyadh, KSA, Saudi Arabia.
2Dr. Ali El-Zaart, Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Beirut Arab University, Beirut, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia.
3Mr. Yousef Al-Suhaibani, Department of Computer Science, King Saud University, Riyadh, KSA, Saudi Arabia.
4Mr. Khaled Al-Hokail, Department of Computer Science, King Saud University, Riyadh, KSA, Saudi Arabia.
5Mr. Abdu Gumaei, Department of Computer Science, King Saud University, Riyadh, KSA, Saudi Arabia.
Manuscript received on November 02, 2014. | Revised Manuscript received on November 04, 2014. | Manuscript published on November 05, 2014. | PP: 62-69 | Volume-4 Issue-5, November 2014. | Retrieval Number: E2427114514/2014©BEIESP
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© The Authors. Published By: Blue Eyes Intelligence Engineering and Sciences Publication (BEIESP). This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/)
Abstract: — Braille is a very important communication code for low vision and blind people. Recently, there has been an increasing trend to use computers for entering, editing and printing Braille documents using special purpose software and printers. Also, there is a large number of old Braille documents that have started to wear out and they need to be reproduced so that they can be preserved and copies made available to many people. Hence, the motivation of this research is the need to duplicate many of Braille documents automatically in very easy manner (like traditional photocopying machine) to be preserved and copies made available to many people. Implications of this research include building a Braille Copier machine that produces copies of Braille documents in exact format regardless of the language used. In addition, this machine is able to work as two-in-one (Coping and Printing). The method used requires optical recognition and image processing techniques so that Braille papers can be copied in similar way to copying ordinary printed text. The results obtained were excellent as we were able to copy Braille documents successfully for both single and double sided papers.
Keywords: Braille Image Segmentation, Braille Cells, Verso dots, Recto dots, Grid formation and Cell Detection