Detecting text based image with optical character recognition for English translation and speech using Android

Smartphones have been known as most commonly used electronic devices in daily life today. As hardware embedded in smartphones can perform much more task than traditional phones, the smartphones are no longer just a communication device but also considered as a powerful computing device which able to capture images, record videos, surf the internet and etc. With advancement of technology, it is possible to apply some techniques to perform text detection and translation. Therefore, an application that allows smartphones to capture an image and extract the text from it to translate into English and speech it out is no longer a dream. In this study, an Android application is developed by integrating Tesseract OCR engine, Bing translator and phones´ built-in speech out technology. Final deliverable is tested by various type of target end user from a different language background and concluded that the application benefits many users. By using this app, travelers who visit a foreign country able to understand messages portrayed in different language. Visually impaired users are also able to access important message from a printed text through speech out feature.