Abstract:
"
Inclusive education provides equal opportunities for everybody to follow their passion
in life. Vision impairment is a disability that historically prevented students from
engaging in academics. However, advancements in technology and especially in the
field of computer vision and image processing have created a level playing field for
those students to follow the dreams of their lives. Many academic institutions today
provide courses for vision impaired students as well.
However, there is a unique challenge that still hasn’t been overcome for vision impaired
students, that negatively affects them. These students use the popular braille writing
system in their assignments, projects and exams. The text that is produced by these
students are first sent to a translator who has the knowledge to translate braille writing
to natural language text. Once the translation is done, then the text is forwarded to the
relevant academic stuff for evaluation. This introduces severe delays and errors in the
process. Optical braille recognition refers to all the technology that can collectively help
solve this unique problem and avoid the step of a manual translation process by
introducing an automatic braille translator to various languages. Students in Sri Lanka
face this unique challenge for the Tamil language. Also most Sri Lankan education
institutes widely use hand-punched braille for most of their work and use braille
typewriters in a limited scope. Therefore, it is important to solve the problem of braille
recognition for hand-punched braille which is even more challenging than embossed
braille, because standard braille measurements don’t hold true.
The system that is proposed through this thesis introduces a unique algorithm for braille
line detection and word detection for hand-punched braille documents. Such a system
will be instrumental in creating a level playing field for visually challenged students in
Sri Lanka. Such systems have the potential of revolutionizing the attitude of the
educationists towards the bold act of including these students into the mainstream
curriculums which encourages inclusive education. "
