While new technologies are often used to facilitate regular people’s lives, they
often fail to see their potential in helping disabled people. Augmented reality currently
offers users the opportunity to add virtual information to their real world surroundings in
real time. It also has the opportunity to not only augment the sense of sight, but also other
senses such as hearing.
In this sense, augmented reality could be used to offer the
opportunity to complement a user’s missing sense. For instance, augmented reality can be
used to help deaf people in “hearing” what an interlocutor might be telling them, without
needing to know how to read lips or without needing the interlocutor to need to know
sign language by outputting the person’s speech next to their head in an intuitive, easy to
interact with, and easily understandable way. As an addition, such a system can also be
used as a convenient translator by travelers.
Using an iPad2 with a camera as the interaction device, this thesis introduces a system with speech recognition and optional language translation and display of the resulting string in an easy and natural way to use by detecting a face and its corresponding position present in the frames and outputting the resulting string next to the detected face in a cartoon-like bubble. The use of this system, dubbed iHeAR, consist in having the user simply angles the device towards the person’s face and once both text and face are detected, the final string is outputted on the screen without requiring any additional steps from the user.
This system presents one of the different aspects of augmented reality that does not only involve augmenting the sense of sight, but also involves hearing augmentation. In addition, the following conditions and limitations are assumed:
• The user does not know sign language or how to read lips,
• The environment is quiet and free of background noise,
• The system will be used for one-on-one conversation,
• Speech recognition needs to happen on the device so as to not depend on network availability.