Pleco for Android Beta 1 Bug Report Thread

smeenz

秀才
My HTC Desire has now come back from being repaired and I've had the change to finally try pleco on hardware with an autofocus camera. I was a little disappointed to find that the OCR feature performed almost as badly as it does on my ipod touch (without autofocus), in that even when presented with a large clear chinese letters, it would constantly cycle through incorrect matches, and never actually find the right ones.

For example, I wrote 房子 in wordpad at 100pt font, with the character rendering about 40mm tall on the screen, and held the Desire up to it, pressed focus, adjusted the green box to contain it (the image filed about 2/3rds of the size of the screen), got a nice clean image, and pleco just kept cycling through things, eventually deciding that the first character was 泳. It never worked out what the second character was.

In case it was a problem with taking a picture from an LCD monitor, I printed it out, and tried again, and had similar results. I then resized the green box to contain just the character 房, and it fared no better, deciding that it was actually 讯.

Is this typical of what I should expect from the OCR module, or is something going wrong ?
 

mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
smeenz said:
Is this typical of what I should expect from the OCR module, or is something going wrong ?

That doesn't sound typical at all - with my Desire here I can get very good accuracy from characters on LCD monitors. Are your hands shaking a lot while you use OCR? Have you tried using it in still image mode yet? (get to that via the menu button while in live OCR) Take a picture of the monitor / paper and then run that through the still image recognizer - does it recognize that reliably?

Also, try holding the Desire farther away from the screen and making the recognition box smaller - does that help matters any?
 

smeenz

秀才
mikelove said:
Have you tried using it in still image mode yet? (get to that via the menu button while in live OCR) Take a picture of the monitor / paper and then run that through the still image recognizer - does it recognize that reliably?
Also, try holding the Desire farther away from the screen and making the recognition box smaller - does that help matters any?

Pretty sure it's not my hands.... I've loaded up a still image taken with the camera app, and the green box is set up, but I'm not sure how to get it to recognise it, and none of the buttons tell me what they do. If I press the one in the bottom right.. a triangle with a line under it, I get a popup, but it shows 一一 (yi yi) in it.. so I don't think it has really taken a look at the image.

If I press the button on the top of the screen, 2nd from the right, which looks like two rectangles with vertical and horizontal lines in them, pleco displays the letters " ' \ S ^" over the top of the image. After rotating the image through 360 degrees using the left and right arrows, it now displays ">_]m" I guess that button changes between horizontal and vertical text flow ?

To be clear - when it was doing live video, it was displaying chinese characters over the top (but the wrong ones). it's only in the still image view that it stopped doing that.

One thing that might be relevant is that I've reflashed this phone with cyanogenmod, so it's running 2.3.3 now.. not sure if that makes any difference.

I've attched a picture of what it looks like - that may clarify things.

And for what it's worth, if I point the ipod touch at the same piece of paper, it gets the words right straight away, even with no autofocus.
 

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mikelove

皇帝
Staff member
smeenz said:
Pretty sure it's not my hands.... I've loaded up a still image taken with the camera app, and the green box is set up, but I'm not sure how to get it to recognise it, and none of the buttons tell me what they do. If I press the one in the bottom right.. a triangle with a line under it, I get a popup, but it shows 一一 (yi yi) in it.. so I don't think it has really taken a look at the image.

There's no button press needed to recognize the image - it's being recognized automatically as you scroll it / resize the box. That button just shows / hides the definition (hiding it gives you more room to scroll around)

smeenz said:
If I press the button on the top of the screen, 2nd from the right, which looks like two rectangles with vertical and horizontal lines in them, pleco displays the letters " ' \ S ^" over the top of the image. After rotating the image through 360 degrees using the left and right arrows, it now displays ">_]m" I guess that button changes between horizontal and vertical text flow ?

Yes, that's correct - it can usually auto-detect it but that button overrides it and forces it into a specific direction. The adjacent button does the same thing with white-on-black / black-on-white.

smeenz said:
One thing that might be relevant is that I've reflashed this phone with cyanogenmod, so it's running 2.3.3 now.. not sure if that makes any difference.

I'm running the exact same version on my Desire here so I don't think it's that...

smeenz said:
I've attched a picture of what it looks like - that may clarify things.

And for what it's worth, if I point the ipod touch at the same piece of paper, it gets the words right straight away, even with no autofocus.

This is really starting to sound like a bug - I literally just pointed my CM / 2.3.3 Desire at your screenshot on my computer screen and it recognized 房子 correctly.

Could you email or PM me the still image file you just tested with? It might be an issue with the characters in it being too large... also, did you try my suggestion about holding the Desire farther away from your computer screen / paper and making the green box smaller?
 
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