[Finished] OCR Project - Pixel OCR - Software Development

March 12, 201510 yr

12 March 2015:

Before I worked on the response code callback and listener, I was really interested in having the welcome screen operate purely based off of color. Although a lot of people don't completely agree with me, I would much rather sacrifice speed for stability.

I did eventually opt to use response codes for the welcome screen, however my interest in creating an OCR application didn't fade away. Here is a pretty early version of my program analyzing a screenshot of the welcome screen:

I want this program to be fully trainable. Currently there are a few other OCR applications out there that are very powerful, but suffer from usability and design. How it works:

A folder is a "font pack" and each image in the font pack represents a character; e.png, E.png, a.png, etc. The image is a simple black and white of the character and the program reads it to create points of reference.

Training it is very easy but it lacks "character construction". This means that if the letter is not the correct size or is slightly distorted, the program will fail to read it. Scanning documents and reading them is probably out of the grasp for this project, however reading text from games will be very achievable.

Some goals:

-Attach to applications

-Option to detect text without defined color (will be slower)

-Process multiple files

-Synchronize multiple image processors

20 April 2015:

I've finally had a bit more time to work on the project and it's coming along nicely. There are a few optimizations made but as of now the code will remain messy until generating the text is perfect.

21 April 2015:

I finally have the complete methodology accomplished, just need to work on some serious optimizations and cleaning up the code.

23 April 2015:

I decided to wrap up the project and host it on my site. To download and view the instructions, click here. There are a bunch of features and optimizations I would have liked to add, but as it stands it's sufficient.