A Pattern Recognition Method for Automating Tactile Graphics Translation from Hand-drawn Maps

Tactile graphics are images that use raised surfaces so that a visually impaired person can feel them. Tactile maps are used by blind and partially sighted people when navigating around an environment, they are useful for explaining the layout of a building or outdoor environment. Tactile Map Automated Creation System (TMACS) is developed for producing tactile maps. Tactile maps, produced by TMACS, often contain many information of roads and streets. The structure of a map should be as simple as possible because of the readability of the map. TMACS, however, does not eliminate unnecessary information automatically; in a tactile map, necessary information such as the origin, destination, route, roads and landmarks should be presented. Thus it is difficult for the visually impaired to read a tactile map produced by TAMCS. The goal of our research is to propose a method for automatic translating hand-drawn maps to tactile maps. This is because a user can draw freely a map which contains necessary information, so that the readability of tactile maps is improved. In this paper, we discuss a pattern recognition method for extracting and classifying objects of hand-drawn maps.