The mobile phone as a platform for assisting the independent living ...

merely designed to process typical “clean” documents, scanned under good illuminationconditions. That is why they usually fail to read text messages embedded in natural sceneimages, where the text background is textured or heavily cluttered, text fonts may differin size, orientation and alignment, lighting conditions are uneven.To confirm this we examined carefully the OCR output for the photographs of the thirdstage of the experiment and realized that in some cases graphics or textures on themedication boxes were falsely interpreted as maximum font text. We also tried to fed theOCR engine with photographs of articles from newspapers captured by the mobilephone’s camera and discovered that it certainly achieved a higher level of accuracy.7.6 Future workIn this section we provide some suggestions and changes for the proposed application inorder to improve its performance.As occurred from the experiments conducted in the evaluation process, the developmentof a technique to exclude the graphics and textures and keep only the text from thephotographs is very important. We found that there is related work conducted [57] [58][59] [60] [61] [62] [63] [64] [65] [66] , focusing on a similar technique referred as “textlocalization in natural scenes”. It is quite possible that following such an approach couldresult in a far better accuracy.As it happened with the proposed indoor localization system, we observed that thequality of the mobile phone’s photographs depends heavily on the varying lightingconditions, limiting the performance of the overall application. It would be interesting totest this application with next generation cameras that capture higher qualityphotographs.Finally, although we already demonstrated how such an application could be an aid tool,we would like to see this system tested in real time environment from people who copewith vision problems in order to be able to better estimate its’ usability.47