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Development of Braille Translation Engine K-Braille for the Visually Impaired... 100% Accuracy Confirmed
< KAIST Professor Hyun Wook Ka >
KAIST announced on the 13th that a research team led by Professor Hyun Wook Ka of the Assistive AI Lab within the Department of Transdisciplinary Studies has developed ‘K-Braille,’ a next-generation Braille translation engine that advances the technology of ‘Braille translation’—converting standard text (mukja) into Braille that the visually impaired can read—and has completed large-scale performance verification. Braille translation is the process of converting information written in standard text, such as books, documents, and web pages, into the appropriate Braille system, and it is an essential technology for the information accessibility of the visually impaired. However, Korean Braille regulations include various exception rules for spacing, symbols, and foreign language notations, making accurate automatic Braille translation difficult. Current Braille programs used by the visually impaired employ a method of converting characters or symbols based on simple rules, which often leads to errors in complex regulation processing, such as mixed expressions of multilingual (English, etc.) and Korean, compound unit symbols, or spacing within parentheses. Since an error in a single Braille cell can lead beyond a simple typo to information distortion for the visually impaired, the importance of accurate Braille translation technology has been consistently raised. The most significant feature of the K-Braille engine developed by the research team is that it is a ‘system that understands sentences.’ While existing Braille programs use a substitution method that simply changes characters or symbols, K-Braille is a technology that analyzes the structure and context of a sentence through morphological analysis and Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) analysis to understand the meaning before converting it into Braille. Through this, it can more accurately handle various exceptional situations in the revised Braille regulations, such as sentences with mixed foreign languages and Korean, complex symbol combinations, and unit notations. To verify the accuracy of the technology, the research team utilized the ‘NLPAK (Standard Text-Braille Parallel Corpus),’ the largest Braille dataset in Korea established by the National Institute of Korean Language. This data contains pairs of standard text and Braille sentences, and the research team extracted 17,943 sentences from it to conduct a full evaluation of how closely the K-Braille translation results matched the actual Braille. The results showed that the ‘True Adjusted Accuracy,’ which indicates how accurately the Braille regulations are actually followed, was 100.0%, and the morphological structure similarity of Braille sentences, showing how similar the structure is to the correct answer, recorded an average of 99.81%, confirming high translation accuracy. Furthermore, in a comparative verification using the same sentence set with the National Institute of Korean Language’s official Braille program, ‘Jumsarang 6.3.5.8,’ K-Braille showed a higher translation matching rate, confirming its technical competitiveness.
< Semantic Braille Translation Architecture Diagram Based on the AST Structure of the K-Braille Engine >
Professor Hyun Wook Ka (KAIST), a researcher with congenital severe visual impairment who led this study and is the advisor to Inseo Chung (28), a student in the Department of Transdisciplinary Studies and CEO of the startup MPAG who donated 1 billion KRW to KAIST on the 10th to foster ‘Inclusive AI’ talent, stated, “Braille is not just a symbol for the visually impaired, but a language for reading the world.” He added, “Based on this achievement, we plan to develop the technology into a next-generation Braille system that can handle mathematical formulas, scientific symbols, and even musical scores in the future.” He continued, “I hope this technology will further enhance the information accessibility of the visually impaired and serve as an opportunity to present a new technical standard in the field of Korean Braille translation artificial intelligence.” The research team plans to go beyond the limitations of the existing Braille file format (.brf) to create a new Braille file format and build an ecosystem for the next-generation electronic Braille file format ‘.brfx (Braille File eXtended),’ along with developing the software and device environments for writing, reading, and sharing these files. In particular, the research team plans to return the K-Braille engine to society entirely free of charge as an ‘Inclusive AI’ technology. However, to prevent technological fragmentation and maintain a sustainable ecosystem, rather than indiscriminate software open-sourcing, they plan to establish official technology transfer and partnership networks with ‘responsible technology utilization entities’ such as public institutions, offices of education, Braille libraries, and assistive device manufacturers. By promoting this within the year, they aim to enable institutions currently building or operating Braille environments and new Braille display companies to immediately integrate the most perfect 2024-standard latest Braille translation module (API and system kernel) without any additional software license costs. Ultimately, the core value is to provide the highest level of barrier-free information accessibility to the final stage of visually impaired users without passing on any costs.
2026.03.13 View 1507 -
KAIST and Google Partner to Develop AI Curriculum
Two KAIST professors, Hyun Wook Ka from the School of Transdisciplinary Studies and Young Jae Jang from the Department of Industrial and Systems Engineering, were recipients of Google Education Grants that will support the development of new AI courses integrating the latest industrial technology. This collaboration is part of the KAIST-Google Partnership, which was established in July 2019 with the goal of nurturing AI talent at KAIST.
The two proposals -- Professor Ka’s ‘Cloud AI-Empowered Multimodal Data Analysis for Human Affect Detection and Recognition’ and Professor Jang’s ‘Learning Smart Factory with AI’-- were selected by the KAIST Graduate School of AI through a school-wide competition held in July. The proposals then went through a final review by Google and were accepted. The two professors will receive $7,500 each for developing AI courses using Google technology for one year.
Professor Ka’s curriculum aims to provide a rich learning experience for students by providing basic knowledge on data science and AI and helping them obtain better problem solving and application skills using practical and interdisciplinary data science and AI technology.
Professor Jang’s curriculum is designed to solve real-world manufacturing problems using AI and it will be field-oriented. Professor Jang has been managing three industry-academic collaboration centers in manufacturing and smart factories within KAIST and plans to develop his courses to go beyond theory and be centered on case studies for solving real-world manufacturing problems using AI.
Professor Jang said, “Data is at the core of smart factories and AI education, but there is often not enough of it for the education to be effective. The KAIST Advanced Manufacturing Laboratory has a testbed for directly acquiring data generated from real semiconductor automation equipment, analyzing it, and applying algorithms, which enables truly effective smart factory and AI education.”
KAIST signed a partnership with Google in July 2019 to foster global AI talent and is operating various programs to train AI experts and support excellent AI research for two years.
The Google AI Focused Research Award supports world-class faculty performing cutting-edge research and was previously awarded to professors Sung Ju Hwang from the Graduate School of AI and Steven Whang from the School of Electrical Engineering along with Google Cloud Platform (GCP) credits. These two professors have been collaborating with Google teams since October 2018 and recently extended their projects to continue through 2021.
In addition, a Google Ph.D. Fellowship was awarded to Taesik Gong from the School of Computing in October this year, and three Student Travel Grants were awarded to Sejun Park from the School of Electrical Engineering, Chulhyung Lee from the Department of Mathematical Sciences, and Sangyun Lee from the School of Computing earlier in March. Five students were also recommended for the Google Internship program in March.
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2020.12.11 View 25847