In many universities, especially in Medical/Dental/Nursing/Health schools, there are many instructors who still use Kodachrome slides for lectures. I've tried photographing those slides (both via scanning the slide, and via taking a pic of a slide projected onto a screen in an auditorium), and then using an OCR package (like Scansoft) to capture the text, in order to use that captured text to build a Powerpoint presentation.
However, the OCR often isn't so great because of the fuzziness around the letters, as the letters and the background color bleed into each other. I haven't tried Neat Image yet (OK, I'll buy it in a day or two), but wonder if it might be able to make the letters sharper, and thus better to work with the OCR software.
That might also be a specialized version of Neat, or a new feature for Neat, one which is optimized for "cleaning" text or line drawings.
Thanks for any advice.
Neat way to "clean up" Kodachrome slides for OCRin
This sounds interesting even the task is somewhat different from noise reduction in digital photos. I suspect that there are some tools to deal with such text and drawings slides around, but this requires some investigation.
With NI, you may try to play with noise reduction and especially with sharpening filter, which may restore some of the sharpness you need to OCR the text and drawings.
Thank you for the suggestion, we will take this as a possible direction for our future work.
Vlad
With NI, you may try to play with noise reduction and especially with sharpening filter, which may restore some of the sharpness you need to OCR the text and drawings.
Thank you for the suggestion, we will take this as a possible direction for our future work.
Vlad
