  Reading text is one of the essential needs of the visually impaired people.
We developed a mobile system that can read Turkish scene and book text, using a
fast gradient-based multi-scale text detection algorithm for real-time
operation and Tesseract OCR engine for character recognition. We evaluated the
OCR accuracy and running time of our system on a new, publicly available mobile
Turkish scene text dataset we constructed and also compared with
state-of-the-art systems. Our system proved to be much faster, able to run on a
mobile device, with OCR accuracy comparable to the state-of-the-art.
