We propose a system that reads the Kannada text encountered in natural scenes with the aim to provide assistance to the visually impaired persons of Karnataka state. This paper describes the system design and standard deviation based Kannada text extraction method. The proposed system contain three main stages text extraction, text recognition and speech synthesis. This paper concentrated on text extraction from images/videos. In this paper: an efficient algorithm which can automatically detect, localize and extract Kannada text from images (and digital videos) with complex backgrounds is presented. The proposed approach is based on the application of a color reduction technique, a standard deviation base method for edge detection, and the localization of text regions using new connected component properties. The outputs of the algorithm are text boxes with a simple background, ready tobe fed into an OCR engine for subsequent character recognition. Our proposal is robust with respect to different font sizes, font colors, orientation, alignment and background complexities. The performance of the approach is demonstrated by presenting promising experimental results for a set of images taken from different types of video sequences.