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A Reading Assistant System for Blind People Based on Hand Gesture Recognition

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Digital TV and Wireless Multimedia Communication (IFTC 2019)

Part of the book series: Communications in Computer and Information Science ((CCIS,volume 1181))

Abstract

A reading assistant system for blind people based on hand gesture recognition is proposed in this paper. This system consists of seven modules: camera input module, page adjustment module, page information retrieval module, hand pose estimation module, hand gesture recognition module, media controller and audio output device. In the page adjustment module, Hough line detection and local OCR (Optical Character Recognition) are used to rectify text orientation. In the hand gesture recognition module, we propose three practical methods: geometry model, heatmap model and keypoint model. Geometry model recognizes different gestures by geometrical characteristics of hand. Heatmap model which is based on image classification algorithm uses CNN (Convolutional Neural Network) to classify various hand gestures. To simplify the networks in heatmap model, we extract 21 keypoints from a hand heatmap and make them a dataset of points coordinates for training classifier. These three methods can get good results of gesture recognition. By recognizing gestures, our designed system can realize perfect reading assistant function.

Supported in part by Shanghai Municipal Commission of Science and Technology (17JC1402900), and in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 61831015.

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Correspondence to Guangtao Zhai .

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Lu, Q., Zhai, G., Min, X., Zhu, Y. (2020). A Reading Assistant System for Blind People Based on Hand Gesture Recognition. In: Zhai, G., Zhou, J., Yang, H., An, P., Yang, X. (eds) Digital TV and Wireless Multimedia Communication. IFTC 2019. Communications in Computer and Information Science, vol 1181. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3341-9_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-15-3341-9_17

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  • Print ISBN: 978-981-15-3340-2

  • Online ISBN: 978-981-15-3341-9

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