JOIN USPortable OCR for the visually disabled soon
That may not be entirely uncommon for some people, who can afford Rs 80,000 investment to buy a five mega pixel camera mobile phone and install the portable Optical Character Reader software in it. But, if the Indian Institute of Science (IISc) efforts succeed, such a system could be available for free to hundreds of blind persons in India.
What’s more, the IISc's software can read Kannada texts that cameras can capture.
"Right now, this is definitely far away, but one of our research students have already started to work on it," said Prof A G Ramakrishnan, Associate Professor at IISc's electrical engineering department.
Talking to Deccan Herald about the demonstration IISc has been holding in its campus of its desktop-based OCR and text-to-speech (TTS) technologies, Prof Ramakrishnan said both the technologies are maturing faster and his department is keeping 2010 as a target to make both available on a single platform.
He said work on both the software has been gradual, since his research students and project team has to cope with several limitations. "The OCR is a consortium project funded by Ministry of Communications and we are working with institutions like IIT Delhi and IIIT Hyderabad," he explained, pointing that computational linguistics a much needed know-how for developing the software, is a rare expertise in India.
"We have got the non-linguistic modules from the institutions and have built the OCR software for Kannada and Tamil over them. The latest version of Kannada OCR has 95 per cent accuracy and recognises pretty much any running text," Prof Ramakrishnan added.
Glitches
However, the software is not without its glitches. Prof Ramakrishnan said special processes have to be incorporated on it in order for the software to recognise numbers and statistical details that accompany text matter.
"For instance, if you make the software read a newspaper article, it may read all the running text, but its understanding of figures and numbers may not be clear at this stage," he said. "But I'm sure we can add another 2 per cent improvement over the Kannada software very soon, since we know the aspects that need improvement."
Free download
But when similar technologies are available for the so-called 'print disabled' -which includes the visually challenged and persons with learning difficulties-what is the point in working on them again? "How many of them can, for instance, pay Rs 80,000 to buy those software and use?" Prof Ramakrishnan shot back. "Our plan is to put the technology up on our website and let anyone download it for free."
"I have been to several schools for the blind in the city and know the astronomical sums they have to pay to purchase access devices and software. I would like all of them to benefit from the home-grown technology."
The demonstration has been organised as a part of IISc's centenary celebrations and to let end users to have a feel of them. Prof Ramakrishnan said the feedback they give often helps his team to fine-tune the software and make it more user- friendly.