I learned what Tesseract can do (and so can you!)

I learned what Tesseract can do (and so can you!)

Made at the Text AV conference at NYU

July 19-21

Corbin Ordel

Programs will use: VDXM5, OCR-OSC, OSC-WEB

Using a couple programs that are downloadable and easy to use (they have desktop icons and everything), you can create your own OCR (text recognition) program!

Step 1:

Download and Install this program called VDXM5, (Or any program that can send video through a syphon as OCR communication)

Step 2:

Download and Install this program called OCR-OSC. These programs were created by a very cool person named David Lublin. He has made some great projects including this one!

Step 3***:

Go to https://github.com/automata/osc-web and follow the directions for install and usage: for your enjoyment and terminal ease - here is a picture of what to do (if you have git and npm package manager installed on your machine)!

(***This step is optional, but if you want to see your collected data in your terminal, do this! Also why not do it anyway! it doesn’t take long.)

~And I quote, “The objective of osc-web is to make possible to send and receive OSC messages on the Web browser.”~ This is very useful for all sorts of cool things.

Step(‘s) 4 (Set up of all components): NOTE: If you want to just watch a video walkthrough, click here --->

  • Open VDXM5 and make a new project (file --> new)

  • Drag your video into your media bin

  • Go to “Plugin” and select “Syphon Output” and select “Main OutPut”

  • Click “Layers” and find the “Crop” button - use the cropping feature to find your desired text, in the case of the attached demo, it is the ticker at the bottom of the hyper relevant cnn video.

  • After your video is cropped, Open OCR-OSC

  • Go back to VDXM5 and go to file → preferences → OSC

  • Click out “Output Ports” and make sure you have something that looks like this:

  • Go back to OCR-OSC and click the drop down menu - you should be able to select “VDMX5 - Main Output”

  • It should be streaming the video from VDMX5 when you select the correct source

  • Now what if we want information in our terminal?

  • Go to terminal and change your directory to osc-web (command is most likely [ cd osc-web ]

  • But wait, no information? Where is it?

  • Go to you osc-web folder and find the web-side folder and click on app.html

  • But wait? Still no information? Go to preferences in OCR-OSC and change your port directed at 3333

  • You should now be set up and watching your very own OCR (text recognition) program!

Let me know if you need more info!!!

Thanks to all the awesome software that @DavidLublin makes and the awesome people who came to TextAV!

Email me @ corbinordel@gmail.com

As google doc:

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