Currency Detection for Visually Impaired Iraqi Banknote as a Study Case

Abstract

It is relatively simple for a normal human to interpret and understand every banknote, but one of the major problems for visually impaired people are money recognition, especially for paper currency. Since money plays such an important role in our everyday lives and is required for every business transaction, real-time detection and recognition of banknotes become a necessity for blind or visually impaired people For that purpose, we propose a real-time object detection system to help visually impaired people in their daily business transactions. Dataset Images of the Iraqi banknote category are collected in different conditions initially and then, these images are augmented with different geometric transformations, to make the system strong. These augmented images are then annotated manually using the "LabelImg" program, from which training sets and validation image sets are prepared. We will use YOLOv3 real-time Object Detection algorithm trained on custom Iraqi banknote dataset for detection and recognition of banknotes. Then the label of the banknotes is identified and then converted into audio by using Google Text to Speech (gTTS), which will be the expected output. The performance of the trained model is evaluated on a test dataset and real-time live video. The test results demonstrate that the proposed method can detect and recognize Iraqi paper money with high mAP reaches 97.405% and a short time.