While OCR-enabled devices are emerging to address the related problem of reading text in printed documents, they are not designed to tackle the challenge of finding and reading characters in appliance displays.

LED and LCD displays are becoming increasingly prevalent in modern household appliances, posing significant barriers to blind and visually impaired persons who want to use such appliances. Experimental results are reported on videos of display images, demonstrating the feasibility of the system. The system has been implemented on both a desktop and a cell phone. We describe a novel system that acquires video, detects and reads LED/LCD characters in real time, reading them aloud to the user with synthesized speech. Any system for reading these characters must address the challenge of first locating the characters among substantial amounts of background clutter moreover, poor contrast and the abundance of specular highlights on the display surface вЂ“ which degrade the image in an unpredictable way as the camera is moved вЂ“ motivate the need for a system that processes images at a few frames per second, rather than forcing the user to take several photos, each of which can take seconds to acquire and process, until one is readable. Modern household appliances, such as microwave ovens and DVD players, increasingly require users to read an LED or LCD display to operate them, posing a severe obstacle for persons with blindness or visual impairment.

Visual novel reader ocr