Host: Japan Society for Fuzzy Theory and Intelligent Informatics (SOFT)
It is difficult for the visually impaired to walk outside alone. For this reason, many systems for assisting people with visual impairments when they walk outside have been studied; almost all of them are developed using GPS, RFID, and image processing. A system based on GPS does not work inside buildings, and a system based on RFID requires many infrastructures. On the other hand, image processing becomes an important technology to develop a system for assisting people with visual impairments; this is because many of the visually impaired have smartphones, and so they can take images by themselves.Base on the background above, we discuss a method for extracting character strings from scene images. In this method, the Canny edge detector is first applied to a scene image, and we then extract character strings. Many edges in a scene image are detected from non-character components. Thus, in our method, edges from non-character elements are efficiently eliminated by using dilations of mathematical morphology and local segment densities. After that character strings are extracted by fuzzy inference. Finally, computer experiments are conducted for showing the accuracy of our method.
