Introduction

OCR (optical character recognition) is the recognition of printed or written text characters by a computer. This involves photoscanning of the text character-by-character, analysis of the scanned-in image, and then translation of the character image into character codes, such as ASCII, commonly used in data processing.

This project is focused on extracting a text from a screen and paste it in any text editor.

What i used to build the system

  • Screen Snipper tool written in java
  • Anaconda with python 3.5.3
  • External python libraries
    • pytesseract text from image extractor.

How The System Works

top level design

When the application user wants to extract text from a screen like codes on youtube tutorial videos, texts that can’t be copied using the usual copy/paste routine etc., First the screen snipper module will snip the selected part and convert it to an image. The image is sent to the ocr server for processing. When the Server receives a new image, it sends it to the OCR Engine and the engine tries to extract the text. If the extraction is successfull, the extracted text will be sent back to the client and put in a clipboard. The user can then be able to paste the text to any editor.

How To Use The Application

A user is wathcing a youtube tutorial about c++ programming and wants to copy the code in the video.

Img 1

On the menu bar, click on the yellow box icon and a popup menu will appear showing Snip Screen option. Click on it and the whole screen dims.

Img 2

After the screen dims, select the part of the text to extract.

Img 3

After Selection, the application will send the selected image to the processor and waits for a response. As you can see on the image above, we have a notification saying the Text is copied to clipboard. After few seconds the notification disappears.

Img 4

Open a text editor and paste the text in the clipboard.

Img 5

How to Launch The Application

  1. Go to the directory where the source code is kept.
  2. Activate anaconda environment source activate <ENV NAME>.
  3. To launch the server, run ocr_server.py file.
  4. To launch the client, run TextCopier.java file.

Demo

You can find the source code of this project here.