Re: Easiest way to do VGA to Text
deloptes <deloptes@gmail.com> writes:
> Martin McCormick wrote:
>
>> I have 4 older PC's that generally work well running
>> debian but Right now, 3 of them need varying degrees of attention
>> to their BIOS setups as Dell motherboards and possibly other
>> brands will occasionally modify their boot sequences for some
>> reason and the only way one can boot from a CDROM is to get in to
>> the BIOS setup and yank the boot order back to one where the CD
>> drive is ahead of the hard drive or put an unbootable hard drive
>> in. Six or eight months later, one will suddenly discover that
>> the boot sequence has fallen back to the useless one where the
>> floppy drive is first, followed by the hard drive followed by the
>> CDROM.
>
> I have not heard so far of working OCR free under linux. I would buy
> commercial software that can work as screen reader. You can pipe the images
> from the linux PC to that software and hear the text.
>
> This is not only the OCR part, but also the reading and what I have seen
> under Linux is all BS. There were very good projects 10-15y ago, but I have
> not heard of a break through in any of them. For example ViaVoice a STT
> program used to run on linux and was dropped when IBM and Phillips stopped
> the project cause DARPA stopped the funding. Festival is good as TTS, but
> is far away from commercial quality and so on.
>
> Making a good reader program is very complex and sophisticated thing and
> there are many unsolved problems to deal with. This means you can not just
> OCR the screen and dump it to the reader - you must preprocess it and often
> go to semantics, which makes it pretty difficult.
I used tesseract-ocr, mentioned previously, a couple of years ago with
very good success. Also, the problem he's trying to solve is much
simpler than the general OCR problem; he's got the actual correct pixels
(rather than a scan), and maybe even have knowledge of what fonts are
used. That makes a huge difference.
> If you have time to waste, keep us posted of your progress. Last time I did
> research on the topic was 10+y ago, when I wrote my thesis on dialogue
> systems, so please, correct me if I am wrong and if there is a useful
> software out there. Honestly I doubt it, cause people massively got dumber
> in the past 10y, of course except the readers of this list :)
>
> best regards
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