Tourist ’s Translator based on Digital Image Processing and Hybrid Translation

Abstract

Being a tourist in a foreign country is not easy when it comes to getting familiar with the local language. From reading signboards to getting unfairly charged while shopping, booking cabs and hotels for their stay, roaming around for sightseeing, communicating with the locals, everything requires an understanding of the local language. Nowadays, everybody has a smartphone, which proves to be the most helpful tool for travelling purposes. We aim to build up an Android application that will be capable of translating text, voice, and also textual information written on signboards from native language to the desired language, users have to use their smartphone camera for signboard translation. We are using a hybrid machine translation approach for language translation. Text recognition from the captured images of signboards is done with the help of digital image processing. The purpose of this work is to reduce the failure of any single machine translation approach and to reduce miscommunication between tourists and the local people.