Banknote Identification Methodology for Visually Impaired People

Around the world, there are many people with disabilities; it is estimated that 39 million people are blind and 246 million have limited vision, giving a total of 285 million visually impaired people. The use of information and communication technologies can help disabled people to achieve greater independence, quality of life and inclusion in social activities by increasing, maintaining or improving their functional capacities. In this context, this paper presents an automatic methodology for identifying banknotes that can be widely used by people with visual impairment. For this, we evaluated a set of four point-of-interest detectors, two descriptors, seven ways of generating the image signature, and six classification methodologies, which can be used as a basis for the development of applications for the identification of banknotes. Experiments performed on US Dollar (USD), Euro (EUR) and Brazilian Real Banknotes (BRL) obtained rates of accuracy of 99.78%, 99.12%, and 96.92%, respectively.