A framework for developing Neural Networks based mobile appliances

The aim of our project is to develop a mobile real-time reader device for blind people. It uses Artificial Neural Networks (ANNs) for the core character recognition engine. The hardware constraints led us to develop a cross-platform framework to design and evaluate such subsystem in order to find a good trade off between run-time performances and accuracy of results. The goal of this work is to provide a tool for prototyping and evaluating ANNs without requiring any insight knowledge of the top-level design tool. At the same time this relies on the same code base that will be part of the target application, thus shortening and making easier the overall development process. In this paper we will present both the proposed software solution and its usefulness in our research project; it enabled us to reduce the needed run-time resources while improving the performance results of the ANN subsystem.