SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR ONSCREEN TEXT RECOGNITION FOR MOBILE DEVICES

• US 20090055778A1
• Filed: 08/22/2008
• Published: 02/26/2009
• Est. Priority Date: 08/22/2007
• Status: Abandoned Application

• Current Assignee: CIT Global Mobile Division
• Original Assignee: CIT Global Mobile Division
• Inventors: Abdelazim, Hazem Y., Malek, Mohamed
• Application Number:
  US12/196,925
• Publication Number:
  US 20090055778A1
• Time in Patent Office: Days
• US Class Current: 715/860
• CPC Class Codes: G06F 3/0488 using a touch-screen or digitiser, e.g. input of commands through traced gestures

Abstract

The invention comprises a method of selecting and identifying on-screen text on a mobile device, comprising: a) providing an on-screen selection icon for activation of text selection mode; b) activating a text selection pointer upon activation of the selection icon; c) applying a text-selection algorithm in a region identified by user location of the text selection pointer; d) identifying text with the region using a character recognition algorithm; and, e) passing the identified text for further analysis as determined by user selection.

Claims

1. A method of user selecting and identifying on-screen text on a mobile device, comprising:

a) providing an on-screen selection icon for activation of text selection mode;

b) activating a text selection pointer upon activation of the selection icon, the text selection pointer controllable by the user;

c) applying a text-selection algorithm in a region identified by the user location of the text selection pointer to locate text within the region; and

d) identifying the text with the region using a character recognition algorithm.

2. The method of claim 1, wherein the activation step comprises contacting the selection icon with a pointer, dragging the pointer along the screen to a desired location, and identifying the location by the final position of the pointer.

3. The method of claim 2, wherein the pointer is a stylus and the mobile device has a touch-sensitive screen.

4. The method of claim 2, wherein the pointer is one of the user'"'"'s digits and the mobile device has a touch-sensitive screen.

5. The method of claim 1, wherein the text selection algorithm includes an image pre-processing step to separate the selected text from a background image.

6. The method of claim 5, wherein the image pre-processing step uses RGB color quantization to establish color thresholds for identifying foreground and background colors, and applies the color thresholds as a erosion mask to convert the selection into a binary image.

7. The method of claim 1, wherein the character recognition algorithm is based on Freeman chain codes.

8. The method of claim 7, wherein the character recognition algorithm compares Freeman chain codes for characters in the selected region against a stored database of Freeman chain codes for specific characters and fonts.

9. The method of claim 8, wherein the database further includes touching characters and Kerning characters as single Freeman chain codes.

10. The method of claim 1, further including a step e) passing the identified text to another application for further analysis as determined by the user.

11. The method of claim 10, wherein the identified text is passed to a dictionary to determine the meaning of the identified text.

12. The method of claim 10, wherein the identified text is passed to a translation engine to translate the identified text into a selected language.

13. The method of claim 10, wherein the identified text is passed as input into a search engine.