About a year ago, someone showed me a clever cloud based service called NEWOCR.COM

OCR or optical character recognition, is the art of clever software scanning a page of printed writing and convert into text.   This is a complex process to turn an image into actual blocks of text that could be edited in  a regular word processor later.

This software has been around for 20 years or more, but never accurate to be accepted in a real life work place.

The beauty with NEWOCR is it works with all kinds of languages include non Latin alphabets.   You can then feed the results into Google translator.

I think this system could be tweaked further and used for police or anti-terrorism work.

I’ve just seen this news article about a training manual recently found for members of HAMAS, the terrorist group who control the Gaza strip.

Open a new tab in your browser, and go to the site.   You can either A) upload a picture saved on your computer or B) use the URL of a specific image you have found on the internet.

Be aware, this will work in languages like Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Russian, Chinese etc.   I’ve even made it work with text at 45 degrees.   The text needs to ideally be large, and text with different images or patterns behind it might cause problems.  Click the blue Upload button.

Now use the corners of the boxes show to adjust which parts of the image you want to scan.   Then click the blue OCR button

Ok Yalla!! – You can now translate your text.

Please don’t expect brilliant translation quality.   Also the NEWOCR site seems to be short of bandwidth and sometimes not always available.

I’d be curious to see how the police and anti terrorism departments could make of this.