scholarly journals SEDIQA: Sound Emitting Document Image Quality Assessment in a Reading Aid for the Visually Impaired

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jane Courtney
Keyword(s):  
Image Quality ◽  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Character Recognition ◽  
Optical Character Recognition ◽  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Image Quality Assessment ◽  
Document Image ◽  
Read Aloud ◽  
Reference Image ◽  
Reading Aids

For Visually impaired People (VIPs), the ability to convert text to sound can mean a new level of independence or the simple joy of a good book. With significant advances in Optical Character Recognition (OCR) in recent years, a number of reading aids are appearing on the market. These reading aids convert images captured by a camera to text which can then be read aloud. However, all of these reading aids suffer from a key issue – the user must be able to visually target the text and capture an image of sufficient quality for the OCR algorithm to function – no small task for VIPs. In this work, a Sound-Emitting Document Image Quality Assessment metric (SEDIQA) is proposed which allows the user to hear the quality of the text image and automatically captures the best image for OCR accuracy. This work also includes testing of OCR performance against image degradations, to identify the most significant contributors to accuracy reduction. The proposed No-Reference Image Quality Assessor (NR-IQA) is validated alongside established NR-IQAs and this work includes insights into the performance of these NR-IQAs on document images.

scholarly journals SEDIQA: Sound Emitting Document Image Quality Assessment in a Reading Aid for the Visually Impaired

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (9) ◽  
pp. 168
Author(s):  
Jane Courtney
Keyword(s):  
Image Quality ◽  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Character Recognition ◽  
Optical Character Recognition ◽  
Visually Impaired ◽  
Image Quality Assessment ◽  
Document Image ◽  
Reference Image ◽  
Maximum Increase ◽  
Reading Aids

For visually impaired people (VIPs), the ability to convert text to sound can mean a new level of independence or the simple joy of a good book. With significant advances in optical character recognition (OCR) in recent years, a number of reading aids are appearing on the market. These reading aids convert images captured by a camera to text which can then be read aloud. However, all of these reading aids suffer from a key issue—the user must be able to visually target the text and capture an image of sufficient quality for the OCR algorithm to function—no small task for VIPs. In this work, a sound-emitting document image quality assessment metric (SEDIQA) is proposed which allows the user to hear the quality of the text image and automatically captures the best image for OCR accuracy. This work also includes testing of OCR performance against image degradations, to identify the most significant contributors to accuracy reduction. The proposed no-reference image quality assessor (NR-IQA) is validated alongside established NR-IQAs and this work includes insights into the performance of these NR-IQAs on document images. SEDIQA is found to consistently select the best image for OCR accuracy. The full system includes a document image enhancement technique which introduces improvements in OCR accuracy with an average increase of 22% and a maximum increase of 68%.

Document Image Quality Assessment with Relaying Reference to Determine Minimum Readable Resolution for Compression

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 (9) ◽  
pp. 323-1-323-8
Author(s):  
Litao Hu ◽  
Zhenhua Hu ◽  
Peter Bauer ◽  
Todd J. Harris ◽  
Jan P. Allebach
Keyword(s):  
Image Quality ◽  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Image Quality Assessment ◽  
Research Area ◽  
Input Image ◽  
Quality Score ◽  
Document Image ◽  
Digital Cameras ◽  
Active Research ◽  
Traditional Approaches

Image quality assessment has been a very active research area in the field of image processing, and there have been numerous methods proposed. However, most of the existing methods focus on digital images that only or mainly contain pictures or photos taken by digital cameras. Traditional approaches evaluate an input image as a whole and try to estimate a quality score for the image, in order to give viewers an idea of how “good” the image looks. In this paper, we mainly focus on the quality evaluation of contents of symbols like texts, bar-codes, QR-codes, lines, and hand-writings in target images. Estimating a quality score for this kind of information can be based on whether or not it is readable by a human, or recognizable by a decoder. Moreover, we mainly study the viewing quality of the scanned document of a printed image. For this purpose, we propose a novel image quality assessment algorithm that is able to determine the readability of a scanned document or regions in a scanned document. Experimental results on some testing images demonstrate the effectiveness of our method.

No-Reference Image Quality Assessment Based on Multi-Order Gradients Statistics

2020 ◽  
Vol 64 (1) ◽  
pp. 10505-1-10505-16
Author(s):  
Yin Zhang ◽  
Xuehan Bai ◽  
Junhua Yan ◽  
Yongqi Xiao ◽  
C. R. Chatwin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Neural Network ◽  
Image Quality ◽  
Quality Assessment ◽  
Image Quality Assessment ◽  
Assessment Method ◽  
Image Distortion ◽  
Image Feature ◽  
Reference Image ◽  
Gradient Magnitude ◽  
Distortion Type

Abstract A new blind image quality assessment method called No-Reference Image Quality Assessment Based on Multi-Order Gradients Statistics is proposed, which is aimed at solving the problem that the existing no-reference image quality assessment methods cannot determine the type of image distortion and that the quality evaluation has poor robustness for different types of distortion. In this article, an 18-dimensional image feature vector is constructed from gradient magnitude features, relative gradient orientation features, and relative gradient magnitude features over two scales and three orders on the basis of the relationship between multi-order gradient statistics and the type and degree of image distortion. The feature matrix and distortion types of known distorted images are used to train an AdaBoost_BP neural network to determine the image distortion type; the feature matrix and subjective scores of known distorted images are used to train an AdaBoost_BP neural network to determine the image distortion degree. A series of comparative experiments were carried out using Laboratory of Image and Video Engineering (LIVE), LIVE Multiply Distorted Image Quality, Tampere Image, and Optics Remote Sensing Image databases. Experimental results show that the proposed method has high distortion type judgment accuracy and that the quality score shows good subjective consistency and robustness for all types of distortion. The performance of the proposed method is not constricted to a particular database, and the proposed method has high operational efficiency.

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