ArtiVision

Inspiration

To help blind people get easy access to education and learning by helping them overcome the barriers they face in daily life & not stay dependent on Braille every time for reading. arduino

What it does

A smart eye-wear system with 'human-like' capabilities for visually impaired people.

It helps visually impaired & blind people read by scanning documents, identifying the text & converting it into speech. This can be easily heard & interpreted.

How we built it

The input is taken using an OV7670 camera device that is connected to sunglasses and will send the data to Arduino UNO. This will save the image file in a folder, which is then detected by our Python script. This script then returns the file name and directory path to another code snippet where Google Cloud Vision and Google Cloud Speech API have been used. These two APIs scrape text from the uploaded image and convert it into speech. The audio output is then given to an audio device which can be interpreted easily.

Challenges we ran into

While building our project, we ran into two major challenges: The first challenge we ran into was detecting the text in the given image. For this, we used Google Cloud Vision API, but the API was not parsing our text input into proper sentences which lead to improper and inaccurate reading of text. Another challenge was to make our OV7670 camera detect the given image & store in a given folder. Since, this is the first time we used this camera, we had to go through documentation and existing codes and do a lot of debugging to know how the camera can serve our purpose.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We used OV7670 camera for the first time in any of our project to capture the images with Arduino. For that we had to go through the existing documentation, existing codes and had to do a lot of debugging simultaneously in this limited span of time. This camera is the main component of our project, without the working of which, our further demonstration couldn’t be done. Finally our code worked and we got to know about working of a new module. Learning how a device new to us works, with using it in our project in such a limited time is what we are proud of. :D

What we learned

We learnt how to use OV7670 camera with arduino in any project. We learnt to use google cloud vision and google cloud speech APIs.

What's next for ArtiVision

To make our device wireless & portable along with reducing its execution time & hence the time lag between image capture and speech conversion. To extend the model for blind women's safety by adding facial recognition features.