Development of a new dactylology and writing support system especially for blinds

Abstract

Although computers are a vital part of life, blinds find difficult to use it. Braille-based devices are available in the market, but a 6-dot Braille supports only 63 symbols while a standard keyboard has 104 keys. Additionally, only 3-4% of the global blind population use Braille. To bridge this gap, a new dactylology is presented in this article. To recognize these symbols, a new feature Reduced Shape Signature (RSS) is proposed which is rotation, translation and scale invariant. Unlike other shape signatures, RSS is compact and on an average 35% reduction in feature-sets is achieved. Additional two features - difference angle and polygonal area - are introduced to classify intraclass gestures. This algorithm is tested with 2950 symbols and it could recognize 2908 symbols correctly. © 2016 IEEE.