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NormCap: OCR powered screen-capture tool

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Re: NormCap: OCR powered screen-capture tool

#12

Post by ElectricalUnion »

csdvrx wrote: post #4

Is there anything on Linux not based on tesseract for the OCR? It's not very good. I miss being able to copy/paste from blurry or deformed screenshots of youtube on Windows.

Tesseract might be "not very good" but it is still state-of-the-art, often available, with many languages supported.

The special sauce - what you need to get a better result - is good, adaptive thresholding (something more advanced that raw naive binary thresholding you get feeding naive color/grayscale images to OCR).

As far as I know, once you get that nailed it doesn't matter that much what OCR you use - as long as it's available and supports your target language.

Re: NormCap: OCR powered screen-capture tool

#14

Post by maxlin »

I created a basic similar app for my own use because I wanted to have an idea what people are conversing in russian in online lobbies. WPF, Tesseract OCR and Microsoft's translation API.

https://streamable.com/ykng5u

A fun side project that I do end up using a bit. Gonna bind the capture to some hotkey so I can use it without changing app focus. Most annoying problem though is that Tesseract OCR often gets confused when you make it read combined latin+cyrillic letters and the font isn't something Tesseract prefers. Especially when there's something behind the text. Kind of disappointed that the most popular API often has a lot worse results than a human would just transcribing the letters.

Wouldn't be surprised if OCR software would leap soon due to a product similar to Whisper.

Comes to mind that the best possible app that does this would be kind of like the old "word lens" iPhone application but on all screens, meaning it would replace text from the raw screen input with text of another language, while keeping the appearance/color/scale/rotation of the original text. This would free it from needing to be built-in to whatever UI library is producing the text, and would work on recorded video too. Immediate latency/performance problems come to mind though but could be a fun thing to try.

Re: NormCap: OCR powered screen-capture tool

#17

Post by lazycouchpotato »

quelltext wrote: post #15
bjoli wrote: post #2

I had my mind blown by the same functionality in Android. Being able to select text from an app in the app-switching context is amazing. I will definitely use this.

That doesn't use OCR.

There are two options for text selection.

Overview selection is Pixel-exclusive and that is definitely OCR since it can detect text in images. It's not perfect however, and it doesn't seem to support non-Latin script.

The other way is to use an app like Copy [1] which analyzes app layouts.

[1] https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.weberdo.ap...

Re: NormCap: OCR powered screen-capture tool

#19

Post by lazycouchpotato »

lgas wrote: post #16
tripdout wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's only for Pixel phones.

How do you do it on Pixel phones?

You need to use the Pixel Launcher, if you aren't already. It might also be restricted to English (United States) only as well.

If you're using gesture navigation, swipe up from the pill to about a quarter of the screen to pull up your recent apps list. If using 3-button navigation, press the square button. Then tap the Select button.

https://imgur.com/a/pJFVr4o

Re: NormCap: OCR powered screen-capture tool

#20

Post by RobinL »

stavros wrote: post #8
bjoli wrote: post #2

I had my mind blown by the same functionality in Android. Being able to select text from an app in the app-switching context is amazing. I will definitely use this.

How do you do this on Android?

You can also do it with Google lens on any android, unless I'm misunderstanding the functionality
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