HAND-HELD DEVICE AND STEP-SCANNING TECHNIQUE FOR READING BY THE BLIND

摘要

The present invention provides a hand-held device for step-scanning a document by freely placing it on the document at multiple positions, wherein the said device shaped as horn with an ergonomic hand-held pack, comprising of a set of cascaded and rigidly attached identical imaging modules, an equal number of identical lenses mounted on the imaging modules at an appropriate height such that all of them have cascading fields of views horizontally, a high speed standard communication interface with a computer, made of material to allow imaging with the help of ambient or internal light, a single control button for snapping images simultaneously from all the modules and other control buttons for operations regarding preferred reading; a specially designed device driver/software to simultaneously acquire images from all the imaging modules, merge all the images by fixed translation parameters manually pre-calibrated in a software environment for seam-less joining of images as a mosaic in the horizontal direction, suitable for text reading by a standard OCR or generating a panoramic image of the under-placed document or picture; optionally removing incomplete lines at the top and bottom of the scan, optionally removing white space at both top and bottom including automatic new page detection, suitable for techniques automatically providing the continuity of various step-scans for images or text converted using a standard OCR in different passes, providing text or image output for speech or tactile reading, suitable for operation by the blind.