1. B-READER (Giving vision to the blind) Team Leads: Rahul Srivastava, Siddharth Parashar Pranav Chaturvedi Mansi Khare

2. What is B-READER? B-READER is a project to aid the blind people.

3. BLINDNESS Problem of access to information. Can't read newspaper, magazines and books.

4. VISUAL IMPAIRMENT STATISTICS Approximately 800 million people worldwide are blind. The number is steadily increasing due to diabetes, eye diseases, traffic accidents, aging and other causes. Around 90 percent of blind people live in low- income and under-developed countries.

5. PAST WORK TO AID BLIND PEOPLE Braille system developed in 1821. Optacon (Optical Tactile Converter) was developed in 1970. Talking books. Screen readers.

6. OUR QUEST Quest for a machine that can open the world of ordinary books to blind readers. Affordable and easy to use.

7. SYSTEM DESIGN AND WORK A prototype would be designed using a controllable webcam,a laptop PC and headphones. The text material is kept at proper orientation to the system. Our system tries to identify the text region in the image. Then it zooms into the found areas to retake higher resolution images necessary for character recognition.

8. The images are then processed based on character recognition algorithm. Then the recognized text is converted to audio which is delivered to the head-phones.

10. OPTICAL CHARACTER RECOGNITION

11. SPEECH SYNTHESIS

12. SALIENT FEATURES The project work is for a social cause. Low cost project having budget around Rs 2500/- Consisting of stuffs easily available at home : camera and headphones.

13. RESEARCH WORK To develop efficient algorithm for fast and accurate reading. ECE & CSE branch students required. Project to be completed till Feb -2014.