A Character Recognition Mobile App for Interactive Learning

Many of the learning resources are mainly based on either physical materials, electronic devices/software or the internet. There is usually no interaction between the printed materials and the digital information. We propose to use the mobile devices to help readers, especially students, to learn the meanings of some unknown/unfamiliar characters and idioms on their printed materials (e.g. textbooks). What they have to do is just to activate the app’s camera and point it to the word or idiom that they do not understand, and a dictionary of the word/idiom with audio support will be provided on the screen. Although we demonstrate our app on Chinese characters in this paper, it can be applied to other languages. With this app, textbook learning can be so much more fun, easy and interactive.

Yiqun Li
Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR