VietNamNet Bridge - The reading glasses invented by HCM City's students Nguyen Hoang Minh Khoi and Vu Phuong Thao can recognize characters and emit sounds with a high accuracy rate of 89 percent.


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The smart glasses for visually impaired people



The glasses for visually impaired people won first prize at the national science contest for southern high school students. The glasses will be shown at the Intel International Science and Engineering Fair (Intel ISEF) 2018 in the US in May, 2018. 

The 12th graders attend Le Hong Phong High School for the Gifted in HCM City. 

Thao said many visually impaired people in Vietnam want to read books, newspapers and other kinds of text documents. 

However, there are few supporting tools available in the market. Braille books and reading machines remain unpopular in Vietnam because of the expense. 

“We want to design a pair of glasses which can serve as smart eyes. This will allow them to access information and become more self-confident,” Thao explained.

The camera of the glasses captures text images which are transferred to a phone for analysis and script recognition with Google Vision, together with Tesseract (a technique for identifying characters on a photo. It then emits reading sounds for visually impaired people.

According to Thao, the most outstanding achievement is that the model recognizes images of Vietnamese letters, processes and neutralizes noise on the programming language platform. This recognize letters more accurately and on more types of documents.

The camera of the glasses captures text images which are transferred to a phone for analysis and script recognition with Google Vision, together with Tesseract (a technique for identifying characters on a photo. It then emits reading sounds for visually impaired people.

The inventors have also applied 4.0 technologies, such as learning machines and artificial neural networks, to train the Vietnamese character database to improve accuracy. The data is updated continually.

The glasses were used for trial use at the HCM City Blind Association and the Nguyen Dinh Chieu Specialized School. They have improved the text processing pretreatment and upgraded the post-processing to produce completed texts and turn them into sounds.

The inventors have received good feedback from those who tried the glasses. They said the accuracy rate was up to 89 percent.

However, some disadvantages still exist. The glasses are heavy with accessories occupying large space and producing heat. The algorithm of the software is not optimized, while the software only runs on Android.

Thao and Khoi are working further on the glasses to improve the recognition unit. They hope the glasses will be useful for more languages and handwriting as well.


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