OCR!
- Thread starter mikelove
- Start date
character said:
Looks like a nice simple solution, yes - I suspect there'll be a whole bunch of these getting bandied around once the OCR update is finally out.
sebv said:
Yes, though it's "experimental" (not accessible unless you turn it on in Settings) in the first release since it's still very preliminary / buggy / not-fleshed-out.
sui.generis
探花
dustpuppy said:
Heh. I actually started my studies with a paper dictionary (zhongwen.com's printed version -- loved those indices), and I suspect, based on reading that ^, that it's a good thing I did. Although I did come to rely on Pleco heavily, doing the work was a good thing, got me into the right mindset.
If you want to learn the material, make yourself dig in now, and later just look at OCR as easing the load. Tech definitely makes things you already do easier, but it rarely gets you to (consistently, after the novelty wears off) do work you wouldn't bother with before.
petermeigen
Member
Hello Mike,
Thank you for checking-out the new ipod touch device - however the news is quite dissapointing !!
If the autofocus-cam is the iphone 4 would be rated 100%, how much % would you give the
cam on the 3GS ?
Thank you for checking-out the new ipod touch device - however the news is quite dissapointing !!
If the autofocus-cam is the iphone 4 would be rated 100%, how much % would you give the
cam on the 3GS ?
petermeigen said:
Probably 80-90%; it doesn't seem to be able to focus
BTW, in case it wasn't obvious: we submitted the OCR update to Apple more than a week ago, so now we're just waiting on them; reports are that reviews have been slow for everybody lately, possibly because Apple's been busily training their review staff for the newly-announced Mac App Store.
dustpuppy said:
Had to re-submit with some critical bug fixes, actually, so probably not until next week now - hopefully they'll clear out their queue faster post-Back-To-The-Mac conference (I'd think they'd want to demonstrate their efficiency to Mac developers weighing whether or not to add their apps to the Mac App Store).
You'll know OCR is available because there'll be a Pleco update in your App Store "Updates" tab.
petermeigen
Member
As far as I know, the new ipod touch will have Autofocus, but just in the video-mode.
Do I have to use the picture modus while using OCR ? The Video-Modus won't work at all ?
I am aware, that the cam and video resolution are far away from the cam the 3gs or new 4th
iphone have - however i am wondering about the following :
3gs just have a 480x320 screen and thus the handwriting input is based on the same resolution,
and this works fine .... And this is a 0.15 megapixel input ...
Is it not more or less the same technique, whether to identify the correct character
from handwriting or just a picture ? Is a essential reason maybe the stroke-order ?
In another post you, Mike, telling me, the 3gs can regognize down to 80% of the characters
the iphone 4 can identify ....
Sorry, but I cannot help myself, that you, Mike, trying your best to promote Apples new
products and everything else/old is just not useful anymore ....
Do I have to use the picture modus while using OCR ? The Video-Modus won't work at all ?
I am aware, that the cam and video resolution are far away from the cam the 3gs or new 4th
iphone have - however i am wondering about the following :
3gs just have a 480x320 screen and thus the handwriting input is based on the same resolution,
and this works fine .... And this is a 0.15 megapixel input ...
Is it not more or less the same technique, whether to identify the correct character
from handwriting or just a picture ? Is a essential reason maybe the stroke-order ?
In another post you, Mike, telling me, the 3gs can regognize down to 80% of the characters
the iphone 4 can identify ....
Sorry, but I cannot help myself, that you, Mike, trying your best to promote Apples new
products and everything else/old is just not useful anymore ....
petermeigen said:
It doesn't have autofocus in either mode, the lens simply doesn't support it; its camera only captures images at video resolution, which is why they mention it working for video but not for still photos. You can take still photos with it, but they're really tiny and low-res. The low resolution actually isn't that big a problem for OCR, but since the lens is designed to focus on objects at the sort of distance people normally take photos at (friends standing a few feet away, e.g.), when you hold it up to a piece of paper / book page / etc the image gets out-of-focus, and without autofocus there's no way for the camera to adjust itself to focus on that image correctly.
petermeigen said:
It's actually totally different - the system doesn't even look at the image on the screen of the character you drew; instead, every time you move your finger on the screen it records the point that your finger moved to. (it then draws a line on the screen from the previous point to the current one, so that you can see what you're drawing)
The resolution for touchscreen input isn't even any better on the iPhone 4 than on the 3GS (as far as we can tell), and in fact we've noticed no difference in handwriting input accuracy between the 3GS and 4 (or even between the 3G and 4), but because the system is recording the strokes as you draw them, it's very easy for it to tell where each stroke is in the character you drew; where it starts, where it ends, what its shape is, what order you drew the strokes in... figuring out this information from a photograph of a character is much much harder, in fact it's the hardest thing about OCR, and if the character isn't even in focus it can be pretty much impossible. So the stroke order is part of it, as you say, but the clear picture of exactly where each stroke starts and ends is even more important.
petermeigen said:
Oh, I'd actually like to be doing the opposite - if people spend less money on their iDevices then they have more money to spend on Pleco
If I could have bribed Apple to put a better lens in the iPod Touch I would have, we're losing a ton of potential sales because OCR only works on the iPhone 3GS/4. The iPhone 4 does seem to do a slightly better job of recognizing text than the 3GS does, so when people ask me about that I have to give them an honest answer; I'd be happier if there was no performance difference, but I'm not going to lie about it.dustpuppy said:
It's gone from "Waiting for Review" to "In Review," but the consensus among iPhone developers (which agrees with our own past experience) is that that doesn't tell you a whole lot about how it's coming along in the process. We've had it go from "Waiting for Review" to "In Review" within an hour or two after submission and then stay "In Review" for a week or more, we've had it take a week or more to get to "In Review" and then be approved just a few hours later, and we've had each part take roughly the same amount of time... so we just don't know how long it'll be.
Hello there! I would just like some quick clarification. From what I'm gathering, OCR will only be offered as a standalone product, correct? I also read one of your posts saying that your bundles were likely going to be shuffled up. Could you describe what kind of changes will be made?
Thanks!
Thanks!
x2o said:
OCR will only be a standalone add-on, yes - we don't plan to include it in any bundle since we don't want to have to raise prices of the bundles - which we would, the per-copy royalties we pay on OCR are pretty high - when anyone with an iPod / iPad / pre-3GS iPhone won't be able to use it. Plus, thanks to the way In-App Purchases work, if we did add OCR to a bundle we'd have to give a free copy of it to the thousands of people who already bought that bundle (no way around it, they'd get it automatically), which we really can't afford to do on account of those royalties.
The bundles aren't going to change at all yet - they'll change sometime in 2011 at the same time that we introduce several new dictionaries, and we're honestly not sure how yet since we haven't finished negotiating the license terms for those new dictionaries (and hence aren't certain what the royalties are going to be).
YoshiCookie
秀才
So it could be another week? :cry:
YoshiCookie said:
Could be, but hopefully not - probably won't happen today as it's already past 5 in Cupertino, they do sometimes work later but we'd have at least a few hours' advance notice for an update like this since they'd have to do a test purchase of the OCR add-on before they could approve it and they haven't yet (I'd get an email alert if they did), but it could happen as early as tomorrow or it could happen next week.
Aside from OCR, there's not that much in 2.2 that justifies this sort of excitement, though - a lot of bug fixes and some nice little improvements like tap-hold text selection but no major UI redesign (that's now due to come in 2.3 though a lot of it may show up in incremental 2.2.x type updates). Some pretty significant under-the-hood changes but the benefits of those won't really be felt for a couple of updates - they do poke through in one or two places, though, for example dictionary deletions and updates now take effect instantly so there's no need to restart the app.