identifying text chars in an image

[Phil Davis]

One thing I found is when I cropped my test image to include only one 
horizontal word, tesseract handled that fine. So... if I could detect 
the grid pattern in which all the letters are laid out, maybe I could 
feed the letters to an OCR tool one word or char at a time and get the 
results I'm looking for. That would also give me clear info about 
spatial relations between the letters, so I could group them correctly 
into words.

So maybe I should first be asking about detecting the grid established 
by the scrabble letters.

(It's actually Bananagrams letters. My nerdy grandkids like to use 
Scrabble letters when playing Bananagrams so they can see who gets high 
score.)

Thanks -
Phil


On 10/28/19 2:23 PM, Phil Davis via use-livecode wrote:
> Thanks for the followup on this. I experimented some with tesseract 
> and came to the same conclusion.
>
> Since the values assigned to each character are standard wthin 
> Scrabble, I don't really need to detect those tiny numerals. But the 
> alpha chars are of course essential.
>
> I believe there must be a way to get there. Thankfully no one is 
> pressuring me to finish it, so I can explore.
>
> Phil
>
>
> On 10/28/19 1:57 PM, hh via use-livecode wrote:
>> After a second read I think it will be hard to find a service to do that
>> for you. And this is not doable using tesseract or similar from 
>> LiveCode:
>>
>> AFAIK, no "ordinary" OCR software is able to detect and read horizontal
>> *and* vertical text and distinguish clearly between the board's "Score
>> text" and the "Scrabble letters". You (or your service) would have to
>> write an own "learning routine" for that.
>>
>> E.g. the algorithm described here:
>> http://rasdasd.com/projects/Scrabble_Detector/Scrabble_Paper.pdf
>>
>> There are also approaches for own specialized boards like here
>> https://github.com/eladj/ScrabbleOCR
>> You could try to use the java from there via LC Builder's FFI.
>>
>>> Phil D. wrote:
>>> I want to [programmatically] take a picture of a Scrabble board and 
>>> then
>>> take from that image the characters displayed in it, and maintain the
>>> organization of the text. In other words, I want to convert the text
>>> displayed in the image to text strings.
>>>
>>> Any ideas where I should start?
>>>
>>> I would love to be able to do it in my app. However I'm not completely
>>> against uploading the image to a service that would do it for me; I am
>>> only mostly against it.
>>
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>

-- 
Phil Davis
503-307-4363