Reading the scene

New software uses a model of how the brain interprets shapes to locate, analyse and report text in any orientation and font in a photographic image.

A digital photograph of a busy street scene on a PC contains an enernous variety of  text in differing fonts and orientations. Shop signs, adverts on buses, street names, road markings and signposts are all present but none of it is square-on to the camera. The human eye can easily recognise and understand all the text on display, but until now it has proven very difficult to replicate on a computer. SceneReader, a software tool made by break-step productions, can take the photograph as input and return all the text in a useable format.

Patrick Andrews, Managing Director of break-step productions, which makes SceneReader, said, “The idea for SceneReader came to me when I was a research student with the late Fergus Campbell, FRS. It occurred to me to write a program that would coarsely emulate the functions which we know certain cells in the visual cortex of primates perform. The original version was implemented using a simple spreadsheet. Since then it has been professionally developed and extended by our in-house technical team.”