Braille is the most effective means of written communication between
visually-impaired and sighted people. This paper describes a new system
that recognizes Braille characters in scanned Braille document pages. Unlike
most other approaches, an inexpensive flatbed scanner is used and the system
requires minimal interaction with the user. A unique feature of this system is
the use of context at different levels (from the pre-processing of the image
through to the post-processing of the recognition results) to enhance robustness
and, consequently, recognition results. Braille dots composing characters are
identified on both single and double-sided documents of average quality with
over 99% accuracy, while Braille characters are also correctly recognised in
over 99% of documents of average quality (in both single and double-sided
documents)