Recognition of Amharic Braille Documents
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Date
2010-06
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Addis Ababa University
Abstract
There are more than half million visually impaired people in Ethiopia consisting of students,
teachers, artists, lawyers, and also employees who have significant contribution in politics,
religious, economics and social affairs of the society. For these people Braille is the means for
codifying their knowledge. However, most of their work still remained in their Braille and of
course accessed only by those who read and/or write Braille. Since 1924, there are a significant
number of old Braille documents produced and used by visually impaired society throughout the
country. From this, very insignificant number of Braille has actually reached to the vision society
creating communication gap between the vision and visually impaired people. In addition to
these, at present, blind students attend regular schools together with their sighted peers in the
elementary, secondary and tertiary levels. However, it is difficult, among others, to take quizzes
and examinations without the help of others (vision students) in reading and writing, and also in
submitting assignments for their teachers. In general, there is no means of written
communication between blind and sighted people.
In this study an attempt is made to explore the possibility of developing an OBR (optical Braille
recognition) system for real life single sided Amharic Braille documents. The system is
implemented using artificial neural network for 238 Amharic characters, 10 Arabic numerals and
19 punctuation marks. Gaussian filtering with adaptive histogram equalization and
morphological operations are used so as to detect and remove the noises in the real life Amharic
Braille documents. The noise detection and removal, and thresholding algorithms are integrated
with the previous algorithm implemented for recognition of clean Amharic Braille documents.
The present system achieves an accuracy of 95.5%, 95.5%, 90.5%, and 65% for clean, small
level noisy, medium level noisy and high level noisy Braille documents respectively. This
research approach to control noise in the real life Braille document to a great extent, however,
there is some addition and deletion of dots.
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Amharic Braille Documents