Technical Drawings Understanding for the Blind Dr. George Ioannidis

Project PresentationDate, 2 Who am I  Current Position Managing Director at Image Processing Department / Technologie-Zentrum Informatik, Bremen, Germany  Degrees Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering, NTUA, Greece  Focus: medical imaging, interpretation Diploma in Management Studies, BCUC, UK  Focus: Technology Management Current interests Management, indexing and interpretation of multimedia documents Technology transfer for ALL European citizens

Project PresentationDate, 3 Why TeDUB  Partially sighted and blind people do not have any access to images at all [beside the ALT text]  Technical Drawings are used at: Work e.g. in construction and planning facilities Education e.g. in engineering sciences  Technical drawings considered in the TeDUB Project (of electronic, architectural and software engineering type) build a well defined application domain with an existing typology (DIN, ISO Norm)

Project PresentationDate, 4 Consortium  TZI: Technologie- Zentrum Informatik, University of Bremen, Germany  FNB: Federatie van Nederlandse Blindenbibliotheken, Netherlands  CU: City University London, United Kingdom  UMIST: Department of Computation, University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, United Kingdom  UIC: Unione Italiana Ciechi di Verona, Italy  FHP: F.H. Papenmeier GmbH & Co. KG, Germany  NCBI: National Council for the Blind of Ireland, Ireland End-UserSystemTechnology

Project PresentationDate, 5 Technological Objectives  Development of an environment for handling technical drawings (plug-in or stand-alone)  Development of an image processing module for analysing images for contents that match technical drawings  Appropriate interfaces for blind computer users to handle the extracted data (tactile and/or auditory output combined with keyboard input devices)  Screen Reader independence

Project PresentationDate, 6 Project’s Milestones  July 2002: Pre-prototype review  October 2002: 1st review  May 2003: TeDUB V1  June 2004: TeDUB V2

Project PresentationDate, 7 User Interfaces  Text-based (speech reader)  Static tactile overlay  2D stereo sound (earcons)  Force-feedback joystick  3D Sound

Project PresentationDate, 8 TeDUB - IT Platforms - Standards  System Graphic Analysis Module in JAVA - Virtually any mainstream technology Presentation module is Windows based  but module interface in standard XML - possible implementation as a web application  Contribution to Standards Description of multimedia content Navigation in multimedia content

Project PresentationDate, 9 (My) Concertation Topic Accessible Semantic Web  Navigation and exploration of multimedia content (support of edutainment scenarios)  Develop assistants for impaired people to facilitate every day tasks over the web  Build appropriate presentation interfaces (Text, sound, tactile, multimodal)  Develop further the standards for WAI

Project PresentationDate, 10 Image Analysis Approach  Acquisition - Pre-processing - Segmentation – Feature Extraction – Recognition Knowledge base V 1 + V 2 + … transistor V 1 : {rectangle} V 2 : {triangle} …