Posts

Showing posts from January, 2012

Chinese OCR: translating scanned or photographied Chinese text to any language

Image
Having lived in China for almost 3 years now I am able to recognize a good bunch of characters, I can type in Chinese on the computer too but writing is much easier than reading since it doesn't require you to actually memorize the characters, you just type in pinyin (phonetics). That is not enough to understand a full, complex text. After months of research I've finally figured out how to recognize chinese characters automatically from a picture , in order to copy/paste the text into a translator such as Google translate or others. The solution was right under my eyes all this time: Microsoft Office 2007 . I had no idea that Office 2007 came with such features. I've always known of expensive solutions such as Ominpage Pro, but I refused to resort to purchasing the app considering its price and how little I would need it. OCR , which stands for Optical Character Recognition , is the principle of proceeding to the digital analysis of an image to extract the characters/t