Anchor-Free Braille Character Detection Based on Edge Feature in Natural Scene Images

Braille character detection helps communication between normal and visually impaired people. The existing Braille detection methods are all aimed at scanning Braille document images while ignoring natural scene Braille images and CNN shining in the field of pattern recognition is rarely used for Braille detection. Firstly, a natural scene Braille image data set named NSBD was constructed. Then, an anchor-free Braille character detection based on the edge feature was proposed by analyzing that Braille characters in natural scene images that are relatively small in size, and a Braille character is composed of Braille dots that werelocated at the edge region of Braille character. Finally, the performance of the proposed method and other classic methods based on CNN was compared on NSBD. The experimental results show that the proposed method has good performance.