(Archived) EN OCR using Blackjack Camera: Size vs Sharpness?

[tokabowla 0]

I've not had a lot of luck with the text recognition in jpgs I've taken using my Samsung Blackjack camera. It's a 2 mega-pixle camera and the pics I take are at 1280x960, of course I always try & get the best lighting possible and make it as straight as possible, but no joy. I seem to be in a catch 22. When I make the text I'm photoing as large as possible by snapping the pic as close as I can while still including the text, it's too blurry for EN to parse. If I pull away from the text to try & get it looking as sharp or "in-focus" as possible, the text is too small for EN to parse. Quite fustrating. I'm shocked at how picky EN seems to be with the text, even though it can recognize the most horribly scribbled handwriting! I'm only able to get about a third of the text recognized & searchable in the pics I take. I

Of course LARGE FONT TEXT is recognized, but hardly anything anyone would want to put in EN is going to be 70pt Time New Roman! Slightly "off" fonts and text that's at an average font size seem to elude the character recognition of EN.

So which would be better? Make the text as large as possible yet blurry, or have it as sharp & in-focus as possible, but have the text be very small?

Thanks for your advise!

[engberg 89]

I use the same phone, and I haven't been very happy with the camera in most settings.

Like most camera phones, it does not have a "macro mode", so anything within a foot or so is out of focus. In addition, it is very very hard to get a stable picture using indoor lighting ... unless I set the phone on the edge of a table or something, pictures come out with motion blur. This is all an issue of the lens and CCD ... it's not really a problem with the number of pixels in the image.

Unfortunately, this makes it pretty hard to use for paper documents (e.g. business cards). If you can get bright lighting and if you can set the camera against something solid, it can handle large handwriting on full sized paper, but you're going to have a hard time with 12 point type.

It's much better for pictures of whiteboards, signs, billboards, etc.