Gentoo Archives: gentoo-user

From: hw <hw@×××××.de>
To: gentoo-user@l.g.o
Subject: Re: [gentoo-user] extracting text, numbers from screencasts
Date: Sat, 07 May 2016 14:32:06
Message-Id: 572DFC29.1060008@gc-24.de
In Reply to: Re: [gentoo-user] extracting text, numbers from screencasts by Helmut Jarausch
1 Helmut Jarausch schrieb:
2 > On 04/08/2016 03:26:53 PM, hw wrote:
3 >>
4 >> Hi,
5 >>
6 >> what would be the best approach to extract data
7 >> from a screencast?
8 >>
9 >> The task is to acquire some data from the display of
10 >> a GUI program used interactively by a user. There are
11 >> a couple 'fields' (as in "designated areas of the display")
12 >> in which the relevant data is being displayed while the
13 >> program is being used. The acquired data needs to be
14 >> entered into a mysql database, preferably as soon as
15 >> possible. (The program needs windoze, and the sources
16 >> are unavailable :( )
17 >>
18 >>
19 >> The idea is to make a screen recording and postprocess
20 >> the recording with some sort of OCR software. This might
21 >> require using ffmpeg (or the like) to create a single
22 >> image from each frame of the recording; then treat each
23 >> image with an OCR software to get the interesting data
24 >> which can then be entered into the database.
25 >>
26 >> Data to extract is mostly numbers. The relevant fields
27 >> can be expected to be either filled or empty. The FPS rate
28 >> of the recording can be kept reasonably low, like 1 FPS,
29 >> or perhaps even less, depending on how frequent the relevant
30 >> fields change.
31 >>
32 >> Using tesseract comes to mind, but after reading that
33 >>
34 >> "Tesseract's output will be very poor quality if the input
35 >> images are not preprocessed to suit it: Images (especially
36 >> screenshots) must be scaled up such that the text x-height
37 >> is at least 20 pixels,[12] any rotation or skew must be
38 >> corrected or no text will be recognized, low-frequency
39 >> changes in brightness must be high-pass filtered, or
40 >> Tesseract's binarization stage will destroy much of the
41 >> page, and dark borders must be manually removed, or they
42 >> will be misinterpreted as characters."[1]
43 >>
44 >> I'm even more doubtful that this would produce usable
45 >> results with sufficient reliability.
46 >>
47 >> So what might be the best way to get text/numbers out of
48 >> what a program displays?
49 >>
50 >>
51 >> [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract_(software)
52 >>
53 >
54 > I can't help with Gentoo.
55 > Try to find an old (free) version of FineReader which runs under wine.
56 > If you do it only occasionally, transfer the image to an Android phone where there a good and cheap OCR apps, even FineReader.
57
58 It would be too much video to process. Besides, phones are
59 ok for making phone calls and entirely incompatible with
60 computers, which makes them useless for anything else but
61 making phone calls.

Replies

Subject Author
Re: [gentoo-user] extracting text, numbers from screencasts Alan McKinnon <alan.mckinnon@×××××.com>