Optical Sinhala Braille Documents Convertion Methodology for Sinhala Language

摘要

Braille is literally a communication system which is used by visually impaired people to share their knowledge. When using this written system, earlier they embossed dots in braille documents manually and now using machines as well. In the Sri Lankan context, problems arise when it comes to the reading of those documents by normal sighted people. This written communication is mostly used in the education sector in Sri Lanka, in their examinations and throughout their evaluation mechanisms. The process of paper marking and evaluations is not efficient, effective and reliable with the limited number of people who have knowledge of Sinhala braille. This research focuses on addressing the issue of written communication gap between Sinhala blind and sighted people. The proposed system converts single sided braille documents of average quality with maximum accuracy. The system identifies the braille cells and transcribe those characters mapping them to Sinhala alphabet. Braille character recognition is done through various efficient methods. The proposed cost effective system is made an executable system which can display decoded Sinhala characters that are normalized to Sinhala text which is in humanunderstandable form.