Vol.7 (2017) No. 1 ISSN: 2088-5334 Framework based on Mobile Augmented Reality for Translating Food Menu in Thai Language to Malay Language Muhammad Pu, Nazatul Aini Abd Majid, Bahari Idrus * # Center for Artificial Intelligence Technology (CAIT), Faculty of Information Science and Technology, Universiti Kebangsaan Malaysia (UKM), 43600 Bangi, Selangor, Malaysia E-mail: * bahari@ukm.edu.my Abstract— Augmented reality (AR) technology is a technique that combines the real world and the virtual world digitally using mobile devices. Mobile AR technology is expected to help Malaysian tourists who have difficulties to understand the Thai language when visiting the country. Hence, a prototype called ARThaiMalay translator was developed to translate printed Thai food menu to Malay language. The objective of this study is to design a food menu translation framework from Thai to Malay language based on mobile AR, develop a translator application and to test the effectiveness of the translator application. The prototype consists of three main components which are translation based on optical character recognition (OCR) technology, dictionary development using SQLite database and display data from the local database. Evaluation of the developed application shows its effectiveness to perform translation of Thai text with certain features to Malay language. Keywords— malay language; mobile augmented reality; optical character recognition; thai language; translation. I. INTRODUCTION Translating foreign language for a tourist using a mobile phone can prevent undesirable difficulties and allow the tourist to explore the visited country with ease. In visiting Thailand, for example, the use of mobile phone for translating the Thai language to Malay language can help Malaysian tourists to experience the Thai culture effectively. However, developing a real-time translator for Thai language is difficult since the language is complex with 44 voiced consonants, 32 vocals, four stage tones in one paragraph, 10 numbers and five special symbols. The problems in translating Thai language have motivated this research to use mobile AR and OCR to develop a new Thai- Malay translator. AR technology is a technology that allows a virtual image to combine with physical objects on a computer screen or a smartphone in real time [1]. Wagner et al [2] reported the camera phone allows the use of magic lens in carrying out technology-based AR application. For example, mARGraphy application that uses a mobile phone camera to detect a traditional map marker in identifying and displaying objects in 3D so that the user can clearly understand the information on the map [3]. In addition, OCR technology is a powerful tool to bring information from analog to digital [4]. OCR technology is capable to detect, recognize and extract either printed or written text to understand the writing so that it will help users to scan documents that need further analysis.Both technology, AR and OCR has been used for a number of proposed translators including TranslatAR: a mobile augmented reality translator on the Nokia N900 [5], android real time translation for translating Japan language to Indonesia language [6], and application of augmented reality: mobile camera based Bangla text detection and translation [7]. These works have shown the potential of a mobile AR and OCR based apps to translate complex languages such as non-Roman languages. Therefore, this paper presents a model to develop a mobile AR and OCR based app that can be used to translate complex Thai language to Malay language. This paper is organized as follows: Section 2 presents related work about Thai language and translation and also described about AR for translation. Section 3 discussed the model of ARThai Malay translator. Finally, section 4 presents the conclusion. A. Thai Language and Translation Thai text detection is important for the procedures to be used as language translation application using mobile smartphones in assisting foreign tourists [8]. Research of Tanprasert and Sae-Tang [9], type-written character recognition Thai language is complex and difficult. The letters in the Thai language has arches, zigzag, notched and some head and circle. There are also some letters written Thai is almost similar to each other as shown in Fig. 1. 153