[gentoo-user] extracting text, numbers from screencasts

[gentoo-user] extracting text, numbers from screencasts

[hw]

Hi,

what would be the best approach to extract data
from a screencast?

The task is to acquire some data from the display of
a GUI program used interactively by a user.  There are
a couple 'fields' (as in "designated areas of the display")
in which the relevant data is being displayed while the
program is being used.  The acquired data needs to be
entered into a mysql database, preferably as soon as
possible.  (The program needs windoze, and the sources
are unavailable :( )


The idea is to make a screen recording and postprocess
the recording with some sort of OCR software.  This might
require using ffmpeg (or the like) to create a single
image from each frame of the recording; then treat each
image with an OCR software to get the interesting data
which can then be entered into the database.

Data to extract is mostly numbers.  The relevant fields
can be expected to be either filled or empty.  The FPS rate
of the recording can be kept reasonably low, like 1 FPS,
or perhaps even less, depending on how frequent the relevant
fields change.

Using tesseract comes to mind, but after reading that

"Tesseract's output will be very poor quality if the input
images are not preprocessed to suit it: Images (especially
screenshots) must be scaled up such that the text x-height
is at least 20 pixels,[12] any rotation or skew must be
corrected or no text will be recognized, low-frequency
changes in brightness must be high-pass filtered, or
Tesseract's binarization stage will destroy much of the
page, and dark borders must be manually removed, or they
will be misinterpreted as characters."[1]

I'm even more doubtful that this would produce usable
results with sufficient reliability.

So what might be the best way to get text/numbers out of
what a program displays?


[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract_(software)

Re: [gentoo-user] extracting text, numbers from screencasts

[Helmut Jarausch]

On 04/08/2016 03:26:53 PM, hw wrote:
> 
> Hi,
> 
> what would be the best approach to extract data
> from a screencast?
> 
> The task is to acquire some data from the display of
> a GUI program used interactively by a user.  There are
> a couple 'fields' (as in "designated areas of the display")
> in which the relevant data is being displayed while the
> program is being used.  The acquired data needs to be
> entered into a mysql database, preferably as soon as
> possible.  (The program needs windoze, and the sources
> are unavailable :( )
> 
> 
> The idea is to make a screen recording and postprocess
> the recording with some sort of OCR software.  This might
> require using ffmpeg (or the like) to create a single
> image from each frame of the recording; then treat each
> image with an OCR software to get the interesting data
> which can then be entered into the database.
> 
> Data to extract is mostly numbers.  The relevant fields
> can be expected to be either filled or empty.  The FPS rate
> of the recording can be kept reasonably low, like 1 FPS,
> or perhaps even less, depending on how frequent the relevant
> fields change.
> 
> Using tesseract comes to mind, but after reading that
> 
> "Tesseract's output will be very poor quality if the input
> images are not preprocessed to suit it: Images (especially
> screenshots) must be scaled up such that the text x-height
> is at least 20 pixels,[12] any rotation or skew must be
> corrected or no text will be recognized, low-frequency
> changes in brightness must be high-pass filtered, or
> Tesseract's binarization stage will destroy much of the
> page, and dark borders must be manually removed, or they
> will be misinterpreted as characters."[1]
> 
> I'm even more doubtful that this would produce usable
> results with sufficient reliability.
> 
> So what might be the best way to get text/numbers out of
> what a program displays?
> 
> 
> [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract_(software)
> 

I can't help with Gentoo.
Try to find an old (free) version of FineReader which runs under wine.
If you do it only occasionally, transfer the image to an Android phone  
where there a good and cheap OCR apps, even FineReader.

Re: [gentoo-user] extracting text, numbers from screencasts

[Urs Schütz]

On 04/08/16 11:30, Helmut Jarausch wrote:
> On 04/08/2016 03:26:53 PM, hw wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> what would be the best approach to extract data
>> from a screencast?
>>
>> The task is to acquire some data from the display of
>> a GUI program used interactively by a user.  There are
>> a couple 'fields' (as in "designated areas of the display")
>> in which the relevant data is being displayed while the
>> program is being used.  The acquired data needs to be
>> entered into a mysql database, preferably as soon as
>> possible.  (The program needs windoze, and the sources
>> are unavailable :( )
>>
>>
>> The idea is to make a screen recording and postprocess
>> the recording with some sort of OCR software.  This might
>> require using ffmpeg (or the like) to create a single
>> image from each frame of the recording; then treat each
>> image with an OCR software to get the interesting data
>> which can then be entered into the database.
>>
>> Data to extract is mostly numbers.  The relevant fields
>> can be expected to be either filled or empty.  The FPS rate
>> of the recording can be kept reasonably low, like 1 FPS,
>> or perhaps even less, depending on how frequent the relevant
>> fields change.
>>
>> Using tesseract comes to mind, but after reading that
>>
>> "Tesseract's output will be very poor quality if the input
>> images are not preprocessed to suit it: Images (especially
>> screenshots) must be scaled up such that the text x-height
>> is at least 20 pixels,[12] any rotation or skew must be
>> corrected or no text will be recognized, low-frequency
>> changes in brightness must be high-pass filtered, or
>> Tesseract's binarization stage will destroy much of the
>> page, and dark borders must be manually removed, or they
>> will be misinterpreted as characters."[1]
>>
>> I'm even more doubtful that this would produce usable
>> results with sufficient reliability.
>>
>> So what might be the best way to get text/numbers out of
>> what a program displays?
>>
>>
>> [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract_(software)
>>
>
> I can't help with Gentoo.
> Try to find an old (free) version of FineReader which runs under wine.
> If you do it only occasionally, transfer the image to an Android phone
> where there a good and cheap OCR apps, even FineReader.
>
>
>

I had some surprisingly good experience with tesseact in digitizing 
photographed pages of an old book recently. So I gave it a try today 
with a cropped screenshot of thunderbird.

$ convert scrsht.png -type Grayscale -filter point -resize 300% 
-normalize upscaled.png
$ tesseract -l eng upscaled.png out
$ less out.txt

convert is from media-gfx/imagemagick-6.9.0.3
tesseract is app-text/tesseract-3.04.00-r2

Here are my findings:
Any graphical elements sized similar to an character appear as strange 
letters.
Recognition of serif fonts was better than sans-serif fonts, even at 
smaller font size.
Text which can be spell-checked was nearly perfectly recognized.
Gentoo-specific words like "GLSA" and "NVMe" was not correctly recognized.
Selected text (white on blue background) was poorly recognized.
Dates were not recognized correctly.
Times were correctly read.
"convert" time for a initial screenshot size of 956 x 639 pixels was 0.4 
seconds.
"tesseract" time was a little more than 6s on an Intel(R) Core(TM) 
i7-4710MQ CPU @ 2.50GHz, without opencl.
The image conversion and tesseract ocr could easily be scripted.

In short I would say that the following steps would help with tesseract:
Avoid GUI with a lot of graphics.
Try to screenshot just the relevant areas.
Increase GUI font size.
Configure GUI to use a well known serif font, or train tesseract for the 
specific font used.
Configure GUI to use high contrasts, avoid colors which get converted to 
gray.
Tesseract time could be improved by enabling opencl.

I would be interested to hear about your findings with numerical data, 
and which approach finally works for you.

Urs

Re: [gentoo-user] extracting text, numbers from screencasts

[R0b0t1]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 412 bytes --]

Reading GUIs is a lot easier than most things tesseract was designed for.
You may still need a little preprocessing; I suggest OpenCV.

Basically enlarge it, filter to remove noise (sharpening and blob detection
and perhaps another), threshold to get BW image.

Most unneeded for GUI. OpenCV helps greatly in the situations Schutz
describes. Modification of the character data is better but more time
intensive.

[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 461 bytes --]

Re: [gentoo-user] extracting text, numbers from screencasts

[hw]

Urs Schütz schrieb:
> On 04/08/16 11:30, Helmut Jarausch wrote:
>> On 04/08/2016 03:26:53 PM, hw wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> what would be the best approach to extract data
>>> from a screencast?
>>>
>>> The task is to acquire some data from the display of
>>> a GUI program used interactively by a user.  There are
>>> a couple 'fields' (as in "designated areas of the display")
>>> in which the relevant data is being displayed while the
>>> program is being used.  The acquired data needs to be
>>> entered into a mysql database, preferably as soon as
>>> possible.  (The program needs windoze, and the sources
>>> are unavailable :( )
>>>
>>>
>>> The idea is to make a screen recording and postprocess
>>> the recording with some sort of OCR software.  This might
>>> require using ffmpeg (or the like) to create a single
>>> image from each frame of the recording; then treat each
>>> image with an OCR software to get the interesting data
>>> which can then be entered into the database.
>>>
>>> Data to extract is mostly numbers.  The relevant fields
>>> can be expected to be either filled or empty.  The FPS rate
>>> of the recording can be kept reasonably low, like 1 FPS,
>>> or perhaps even less, depending on how frequent the relevant
>>> fields change.
>>>
>>> Using tesseract comes to mind, but after reading that
>>>
>>> "Tesseract's output will be very poor quality if the input
>>> images are not preprocessed to suit it: Images (especially
>>> screenshots) must be scaled up such that the text x-height
>>> is at least 20 pixels,[12] any rotation or skew must be
>>> corrected or no text will be recognized, low-frequency
>>> changes in brightness must be high-pass filtered, or
>>> Tesseract's binarization stage will destroy much of the
>>> page, and dark borders must be manually removed, or they
>>> will be misinterpreted as characters."[1]
>>>
>>> I'm even more doubtful that this would produce usable
>>> results with sufficient reliability.
>>>
>>> So what might be the best way to get text/numbers out of
>>> what a program displays?
>>>
>>>
>>> [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract_(software)
>>>
>>
>> I can't help with Gentoo.
>> Try to find an old (free) version of FineReader which runs under wine.
>> If you do it only occasionally, transfer the image to an Android phone
>> where there a good and cheap OCR apps, even FineReader.
>>
>>
>>
>
> I had some surprisingly good experience with tesseact in digitizing photographed pages of an old book recently. So I gave it a try today with a cropped screenshot of thunderbird.
>
> $ convert scrsht.png -type Grayscale -filter point -resize 300% -normalize upscaled.png
> $ tesseract -l eng upscaled.png out
> $ less out.txt
>
> convert is from media-gfx/imagemagick-6.9.0.3
> tesseract is app-text/tesseract-3.04.00-r2
>
> Here are my findings:
> Any graphical elements sized similar to an character appear as strange letters.
> Recognition of serif fonts was better than sans-serif fonts, even at smaller font size.
> Text which can be spell-checked was nearly perfectly recognized.
> Gentoo-specific words like "GLSA" and "NVMe" was not correctly recognized.
> Selected text (white on blue background) was poorly recognized.
> Dates were not recognized correctly.
> Times were correctly read.
> "convert" time for a initial screenshot size of 956 x 639 pixels was 0.4 seconds.
> "tesseract" time was a little more than 6s on an Intel(R) Core(TM) i7-4710MQ CPU @ 2.50GHz, without opencl.
> The image conversion and tesseract ocr could easily be scripted.

Considering the amount of video, 6s per frame would be too long.
The application is time-critical such that I have a window of about
10s to extract and to process the data from at least 8 video streams.
Recording at only 10 FPS and taking 8 seconds to extract and to
process the data would require 640s per 10s window, and I don't have
about 70 CPUs available to do the work.  To make things worse, it's
an ongoing process, i. e. dividing it into 10s windows is too artificial
to keep things running as smoothly as they should.

> In short I would say that the following steps would help with tesseract:
> Avoid GUI with a lot of graphics.
> Try to screenshot just the relevant areas.
> Increase GUI font size.
> Configure GUI to use a well known serif font, or train tesseract for the specific font used.
> Configure GUI to use high contrasts, avoid colors which get converted to gray.
> Tesseract time could be improved by enabling opencl.
>
> I would be interested to hear about your findings with numerical data, and which approach finally works for you.

Thank you very much for giving me a better idea of what I'm looking at!
Considering it, I have resorted to use autohotkey, which has the ability
to actually read data from GUI-elements.  It also can make requests to
web servers.  With that, things become a hell of a lot simpler than
trying to process video streams, for I can simply read the data and send
it over to the web server which puts it into the database where it needs
to end up anyway.

Unfortunately, the application the data is being read from has a bad
habit of renaming the GUI-elements I need to read.  This makes things
difficult again.

Autohotkey is a really nice tool, though.  I wonder if there is an
equivalent for X11.

Re: [gentoo-user] extracting text, numbers from screencasts

[hw]

Helmut Jarausch schrieb:
> On 04/08/2016 03:26:53 PM, hw wrote:
>>
>> Hi,
>>
>> what would be the best approach to extract data
>> from a screencast?
>>
>> The task is to acquire some data from the display of
>> a GUI program used interactively by a user.  There are
>> a couple 'fields' (as in "designated areas of the display")
>> in which the relevant data is being displayed while the
>> program is being used.  The acquired data needs to be
>> entered into a mysql database, preferably as soon as
>> possible.  (The program needs windoze, and the sources
>> are unavailable :( )
>>
>>
>> The idea is to make a screen recording and postprocess
>> the recording with some sort of OCR software.  This might
>> require using ffmpeg (or the like) to create a single
>> image from each frame of the recording; then treat each
>> image with an OCR software to get the interesting data
>> which can then be entered into the database.
>>
>> Data to extract is mostly numbers.  The relevant fields
>> can be expected to be either filled or empty.  The FPS rate
>> of the recording can be kept reasonably low, like 1 FPS,
>> or perhaps even less, depending on how frequent the relevant
>> fields change.
>>
>> Using tesseract comes to mind, but after reading that
>>
>> "Tesseract's output will be very poor quality if the input
>> images are not preprocessed to suit it: Images (especially
>> screenshots) must be scaled up such that the text x-height
>> is at least 20 pixels,[12] any rotation or skew must be
>> corrected or no text will be recognized, low-frequency
>> changes in brightness must be high-pass filtered, or
>> Tesseract's binarization stage will destroy much of the
>> page, and dark borders must be manually removed, or they
>> will be misinterpreted as characters."[1]
>>
>> I'm even more doubtful that this would produce usable
>> results with sufficient reliability.
>>
>> So what might be the best way to get text/numbers out of
>> what a program displays?
>>
>>
>> [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract_(software)
>>
>
> I can't help with Gentoo.
> Try to find an old (free) version of FineReader which runs under wine.
> If you do it only occasionally, transfer the image to an Android phone where there a good and cheap OCR apps, even FineReader.

It would be too much video to process.  Besides, phones are
ok for making phone calls and entirely incompatible with
computers, which makes them useless for anything else but
making phone calls.

Re: [gentoo-user] extracting text, numbers from screencasts

[Alan McKinnon]

On 07/05/2016 16:31, hw wrote:
> Helmut Jarausch schrieb:
>> On 04/08/2016 03:26:53 PM, hw wrote:
>>>
>>> Hi,
>>>
>>> what would be the best approach to extract data
>>> from a screencast?
>>>
>>> The task is to acquire some data from the display of
>>> a GUI program used interactively by a user.  There are
>>> a couple 'fields' (as in "designated areas of the display")
>>> in which the relevant data is being displayed while the
>>> program is being used.  The acquired data needs to be
>>> entered into a mysql database, preferably as soon as
>>> possible.  (The program needs windoze, and the sources
>>> are unavailable :( )
>>>
>>>
>>> The idea is to make a screen recording and postprocess
>>> the recording with some sort of OCR software.  This might
>>> require using ffmpeg (or the like) to create a single
>>> image from each frame of the recording; then treat each
>>> image with an OCR software to get the interesting data
>>> which can then be entered into the database.
>>>
>>> Data to extract is mostly numbers.  The relevant fields
>>> can be expected to be either filled or empty.  The FPS rate
>>> of the recording can be kept reasonably low, like 1 FPS,
>>> or perhaps even less, depending on how frequent the relevant
>>> fields change.
>>>
>>> Using tesseract comes to mind, but after reading that
>>>
>>> "Tesseract's output will be very poor quality if the input
>>> images are not preprocessed to suit it: Images (especially
>>> screenshots) must be scaled up such that the text x-height
>>> is at least 20 pixels,[12] any rotation or skew must be
>>> corrected or no text will be recognized, low-frequency
>>> changes in brightness must be high-pass filtered, or
>>> Tesseract's binarization stage will destroy much of the
>>> page, and dark borders must be manually removed, or they
>>> will be misinterpreted as characters."[1]
>>>
>>> I'm even more doubtful that this would produce usable
>>> results with sufficient reliability.
>>>
>>> So what might be the best way to get text/numbers out of
>>> what a program displays?
>>>
>>>
>>> [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract_(software)
>>>
>>
>> I can't help with Gentoo.
>> Try to find an old (free) version of FineReader which runs under wine.
>> If you do it only occasionally, transfer the image to an Android phone
>> where there a good and cheap OCR apps, even FineReader.
> 
> It would be too much video to process.  Besides, phones are
> ok for making phone calls and entirely incompatible with
> computers, which makes them useless for anything else but
> making phone calls.


Huh? da fuck you talkin' 'bout?


My trusty collection of Android devices would be very surprised to hear
they now don't have real CPUs, wifi chips, RAM and storage. Or can't run
a web browser, do email, instant chat, play x264 video with less cpu
load than my 8 core laptop, share with smb on the network, do bluetooth,
video calls or any of the other bazzillion things computers have always
done with each other.

How odd. I really thought my Android phones could do all of that. I must
have imagined it .... that means my delusions are worse than I thought
and maybe I need different and more pills from the nice lady who's my GP.



-- 
Alan McKinnon
alan.mckinnon@gmail.com