Has anyone tried capturing stills from video?

Everything camera related. Includes triggers, batteries, power supplies, flatbeds and sheet-feeding scanners, too.

Moderator: peterZ

Post Reply
mjklin
Posts: 17
Joined: 07 Jan 2010, 12:18

Has anyone tried capturing stills from video?

Post by mjklin »

Just wondering if anyone has tried to capture video stills and run OCR on them. I'm tempted to try something like the Looxcie head-mounted videocamera when browsing papers and such--taking video, then going back and grabbing screen captures. It will obviously be of less quality than a static camera, but how much less?

Looxcie link: http://www.amazon.com/Looxcie-LX2-Weara ... B0055QYIY8
User avatar
Heelgrasper
Posts: 70
Joined: 19 Feb 2012, 21:04
E-book readers owned: None
Number of books owned: 500
Location: Randers, Denmark

Re: Has anyone tried capturing stills from video?

Post by Heelgrasper »

As far as I can see, the camera in question has a max resolution of 480x640 pixels (0.3 Megapixel). If we imagne you're scanning a rather small book, each page being 5 inches tall you would at best get 128 DPI and in reality closer to 100 DPI. Usually OCR on anything less than 200 DPI is a waste of time. And this was with a small book. Then there's the post processing where I would estimate you would have to use at least 2-3 times as much time as with a digital compact. There's not even money to safe on the cam.

I'm sorry to be so negative but it just seems like a "crap in - crap out" solution that also requires more work and the same money as a "traditional" setup.
---
Jakob Øhlenschlæger
Randers, Denmark

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there
L. P. Hartley
Post Reply