Abstract
This paper is a study on the development of a wearable sensor system for reading Braille. The study is intended to develop a compact tactile sensor system which uses a PVDF (Polyvinylidene Fluoride) film for the sensory material. The sensor is mounted onto a fingertip as the wearable system and is moved over Braille manually to obtain the output. Since the unsteady movements yield variations in the waveforms, a robust recognition system is introduced. The developed recognition system consists of three components as follows. First, the signal inputted to the system is divided into individual signal regardless of the variation in the waveforms. Next, those signals are transformed into effective feature vectors in order to suppress the variation. Finally, those vectors are classified and the recognition results are obtained. The classifier is composed of organized dichotomizes made from multi-layer perceptrons to enhance the classification accuracy. To carry out experimental verification, test signals are inputted to the recognition system and the performance of the system is evaluated. The obtained results show that the robust recognition is achieved appropriately.
