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Infinity
Lv 4
Infinity asked in Computers & InternetProgramming & Design · 8 years ago

Question about text identification (Concept Design)?

Hello,

I am in the brainstorming stage for a new concept design. The core function of the invention is to have some sort of sensor that can identify text/images (and therefore know when it sees them again). It is much more important that it be able to identify certain strings of written text. Is there anything that does this? How expensive is it? Where can I buy it? Thanks!

Update:

So, I guess I should have probably put this under hardware. You guys are super smart, though, and most of you probably know a good deal about hardware. Help me out? Thanks!

Update 2:

Thanks, Ben. Do you know if there is any way at all this could be done from a hardware perspective?

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  • Ben
    Lv 7
    8 years ago

    What you're talking about is called Optical Character Recognition software. It's currently pretty good, but not perfect. It's a rather difficult problem so it isn't usually done in hardware, but it's pretty readily available. Adobe Acrobat Pro has one of the best OCR systems I've ever seen- you can open up a document containing pictures of text, tell it to recognize text, and it will scan the whole thing for you. HP's printer software also comes with an OCR program but it isn't quite as good as Adobe's.

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