This week, as mentioned in the team report, I continue to experiment with Tesseract, which is important as it’s the main way in which we hope to use OCR to read an image and convert it to braille. The data sets I was experimenting with last week has proved difficult to use in terms of cursive script, so I have been trying to find other, more helpful data sets to experiment with. I will also begin to venture into the real world, taking images of actual labels (medicine bottles, prescription bottles, cereal boxes, etc) to test with Tesseract. I believe my progress is where it needs to be.
In terms of software, this week I will also begin to write the logic to “convert” each English recognized character into actuator pin movement that embosses the braille lettering. For instance, here’s the letter A in Braille:
Logically, I need to tell Pin 1 to engage, Pin 2 to disengage, and Pin 3 to disengage, and emboss the first column. Then, I need to have the tape move over slightly, and tell Pin 1 disengage, Pin 2 to disengage, and Pin 3 to disengage. This is the process for each character. I will think thoughtfully about how to easily modularize this process in my code.