Crosslingual Access of Textual Information using Camera Phones

In this paper we describe a prototype system that recognizes text in images, captured by camera phones and provide access to the content in a different language. Two Indian languages – Hindi and Tamil are used to demonstrate such a system. The prototype system is built using off-the-shelf components, and in house developed algorithms. The acquired image is first transferred to a server, which corrects the perspective distortions, detects recognizes and then translates the text (word). This translated text is sent back to the camera-phone in a suitable form. We have also described here, the Hindi and Tamil OCRs which we use for the character recognition. We also propose methods to make the recognizer efficient in storage and computation. The translated text, along with any additional information, is transmitted back to the user.