TY - CONF T1 - Eye of the Beholder: Phone-Based Text-Recognition for the Visually-Impaired T2 - 2006 10th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers Y1 - 2006 A1 - Tudor Dumitras A1 - Lee, M. A1 - Quinones, P. A1 - Smailagic, A. A1 - Siewiorek, Dan A1 - Narasimhan, P. KW - CAMERAS KW - data mining KW - handicapped aids KW - Hardware KW - Image quality KW - Internet KW - Land mobile radio cellular systems KW - Mobile computing KW - mobile handsets KW - mobile text-recognition system KW - Optical character recognition software KW - phone-based text-recognition KW - Product safety KW - Text recognition KW - visually-impaired AB - Blind and visually-impaired people cannot access essential information in the form of written text in our environment (e.g., on restaurant menus, street signs, door labels, product names and instructions, expiration dates). In this paper, we present and evaluate a mobile text-recognition system capable of extracting written information from a wide variety of sources and communicating it on-demand to the user. The user needs no additional hardware except an ordinary, Internet- enabled mobile camera-phone - a device that many visually-impaired individuals already own. This approach fills a gap in assistive technologies for the visually- impaired because it makes users aware of textual information not available to them through any other means. JA - 2006 10th IEEE International Symposium on Wearable Computers ER -