sfrrr said:
I love McCawley's book! I discovered it some time in graduate school and, since then, have always had at least two copies on my shelves (lest I lose one) and I *never* lend them. If there's any help you need with that project, I volunteer.
Also, off-track, but as long as I'm here...Thanks for the explanation about the (mostly) lame programs made for Android. You have a nice historical take on things, so you put them in context.
Thanks!
andrewjr8 said:
Is their any chance the OCR would work now that we know the new ipod touch's camera doesn't have autofocus, or would it just work in some limited capacity?
If if could work how long would it be before we saw an ipod touch version of the OCR?
We've got an iPod Touch here for testing and it simply can't resolve characters clearly - the recognizer accuracy is downright terrible with anything smaller than a book cover title (characters < 2 cm or so high, i.e.), it gets very simple characters but it's completely useless with more complicated ones. And looking at the raw video output it's pretty easy to see why.
In theory, we might be able to improve accuracy to the point where the iPod could do OCR if we did some very fancy image-processing work to interpolate between frames (sort of like they do in Red Laser), but it would be incredibly expensive / complicated to develop and it still wouldn't work nearly as well as a device with autofocus. (and our investment would be wasted once the iPod Touch 5G comes out with an 8MP autofocus camera)
dustpuppy said:
any chance of a week end release ? pressure pressure
Not quite that fast - the OCR bit is done but there are a few other critical improvements we're still ironing out. (under-the-hood stuff that absolutely couldn't wait for 2.3)
keyclick said:
I played with the new Ipod touch at an apple store the other day. The camera is not too bad. It was able to focus on text pretty close. (the product description placards on the displays, etc.) And there is a "tap to focus" feature. Im sure compared to the iphone 4 it is crap, but it gave passable images. I bet it would work for larger font type, and signs at least. It would probably have to be marketed as 'experimental' so people wouldnt complain, but I would love to see that! (or at least a still-image version with carefully taken or imported pictures)
We probably are going to allow it to be purchased / activated on the iPod Touch, and maybe even on the iPad / older iPods for people who want it for its experimental still image support, but there'll be a whole bunch of warnings you'll have to click through - we may even require that you open up the demo version of it and try recognizing a few words, just so there's absolutely no possibility of anyone claiming they didn't know it would be this bad.
kun4 said:
iphone cases with built-in macro lens exist; for instance the "Griffin Clarify".
http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/clarifi
If similar cases were to pop up for the ipod touch 4 as well, would this improve OCR?
Potentially, but we don't know of any on the market for the iPod yet.
andrewjr8 said:
I was at the apple store today, and I was able to produce roughly the same image of 12pt text on the iphone as I could on the ipod (NOT EXACT), just by being careful.Granted these weren't Chinese characters but is auto focus really essential to the OCR process?
It is - we've done a lot of testing on this with an iPod Touch and it really doesn't deliver satisfactory results with normal-size printed text.
