On 10/17/06, Rony ronbillypop@yahoo.co.uk wrote:
So Krish can try out this method for his project too and this also gives me a positive feeling that the bar code based software transfer technique through a mp camera should be feasible in the sign posts for VI people idea that was discussed some time back. We only need to create our own algorithm for the OCR.
OCR and text-to speech software is hard to get right. Also Why re-invent the wheel? Contribute and add modules to opensource OCR software such as Tessaract OCR[1] (which google uses) or GOCR [2] (see in action[3]). Integrate with low-cost camera and profit.
Better yet make a camera which has OCR and text-to-speech such as festival[4]. You could build a organisation around this. The components are already these. Someone needs to customise them and bundle them together. (This is harder than it sounds). Also costs of digicams is coming down drastically.
-- Vinayak
References: [1]. http://sourceforge.net/projects/tesseract-ocr [2]. http://jocr.sourceforge.net/ [3]. http://blog.eberly.org/2006/10/12/worlds-worst-use-of-a-jpeg/ [4]. http://www.cstr.ed.ac.uk/projects/festival/