Reading glasses for blind people of Saigon students

The glasses of Minh Khoi and Phuong Thao can identify the writing, then emit reading sounds for the blinds with an accuracy of 89%.

Topic Reading support glasses for visually impaired people who have just won the first prize in the national science and technology competition of the southern high school students, selected to attend the International Science and Technology Contest (Intel ISEF) 2018 in the US in May. The author of the project is two 12th grade students at Le Hong Phong High School (HCMC) - Nguyen Hoang Minh Khoi and Vu Phuong Thao .

Phuong Thao introduced the group's products.(Photo: Manh Tung).

Phuong Thao said, the idea arises from the obstacle of many blind people who want to read books and newspapers, all kinds of documents. But in Vietnam, there are only a few means of support such as Braille books, reading machines . These devices are still limited, high prices so few blind people can access them.

"We carried out the project with the desire to successfully manufacture the glasses as a smart eye, support reading for blind Vietnamese people, enabling them to actively receive information and confidence. in life " , Thao shared.

The operation process of the glass begins with the light sensor and environmental value acquisition distance to support the best image. After that, the camera receives text images transferred to the phone for analysis and writing recognition with Google Vision, combining Tesseract (a technique to help identify the characters on a photo), thereby emitting a reading sound for visually impaired.

The glasses for the blinds of the group.(Photo: Manh Tung).

According to Thao, the highlight of the project is that the team has researched and built the image recognition model on Vietnamese characters, processing and reducing noise on language and programming platform. Thus, characters are more accurately identified, on more text types.

"The group has also applied 4.0 technologies such as machine learning and artificial neural networks to train Vietnamese character databases to improve accuracy. These data are also updated continuously , " Thao said. know.

After implementing the project, two students brought glasses to test at the Blind Association of Ho Chi Minh City and Nguyen Dinh Chieu Special School. After that, the two children gradually improved the preprocessing process to identify text and more elaborate in the post-processing part to give the complete character, turning into reading.

Through testing sessions, the group received a good response from the visually impaired when the accuracy was measured at 89%.

Representatives of the group said that the glass is still limited as not compact, heavy, components costly and cause heat dissipation. The algorithms of the software are not optimal, the software can only run on Android operating systems, so it must use the phone. This is very inconvenient for the blind.

"We continue to research to improve the identity, expand more languages ​​and aim to identify the handwriting. The glass is also designed to be smaller and more compact for users to be more convenient , " group representative said.

Nguyen Hoang Minh Khoi (second from left) and Vu Phuong Thao (fourth from left) receive the first prize in the science and technology competition for southern high school students.(Photo: Manh Tung).

The national science and technology competition for high school students in the 2017-2018 school year in the South was organized by the Ministry of Education and Training in Da Lat City (Lam Dong) from 17 to 20 March. Ho Chi Minh City's student delegation has 57 participants with 30 projects in 13 fields. City students led the group with four first prizes, four second prizes, seven third prizes and six fourth prizes.