How RBI's MANI Would Help Visually Impaired?

By siliconindia  |  Friday, 14 February 2020, 06:29:47 PM IST

How RBI's MANI Would Help Visually Impaired?

The Reserve Bank of India (RBI) launches Mobile Aided Note Identifier (MANI) app to help the visually impaired in identifying the Indian banknote's denomination. RBI Governor, Shaktikanta Das, launched the MANI app.

World Health Organization (WHO) states that about 20 percent of the global visually impaired population is in India. This number has instigated RBI to develop an app for visually impaired Indian in order to empower them to identify currency denomination and distinguish them.

In this initiative, RBI collaborated with Daffodil Software to convert their vision into a mobile app. Daffodil has utilized artificial intelligence technology to develop a mobile app. Initially, the company found it difficult to achieve maximum accuracy, especially when scanning the notes in different light conditions and holding angles. To overcome these challenges, Daffodil incorporate machine learning with image classification to develop the mobile app, as machine learning enables the system to learn and improve from the past experience. 

To identify the banknotes, daffodil created a set of 1,50,000 images of old and new banknotes of all the denominations that are in circulation today. Thus, whenever a user scans a note, the app would compare the scanned image with 1,50,000 images in the data set and classify the image according to its visual content and notifies the user.

"Daffodil Software is an early adopter of Artificial Intelligence technology which puts it into the leadership position to build an app like MANI. Being a government of India initiative, this was a key project for us as it was going to empower eight million visually impaired people across India. For people with hearing and visual impairments, the app has predefined vibrations for different denominations of banknotes. For its technical and functional advances, the app has received an applaudable response from the users with over 3,50,000 downloads in the time span of just one month," says Yogesh Agarwal, CEO, Daffodil Software.

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