Mezzofanti – Augmented reality through text-recognition.
(Android phone – application)
What is Mezzofanti: it is an application for the Android Dev1 phone, that allows reality augmentation (as seen in camera mode) with information about any text in view. The augmentation is done through text-recognition.
After the augmentation, the digital text (or parts of it) may be used in various modes:
- it may be translated in one of the 40 available languages
- it may be searched on Google or Wiki
- it can be checked against a dictionary
Technologies:
- the OCR engine is a modified version of Tesseract 2.03, currently developed by Google under Apache License, ver 2.0. – there are 5 available languages available: English, German, Spanish, Italian and French. Never the less the OCR will work with any other language that uses the Latin alphabet (the results will be a bit less accurate).
- the interface between the OCR engine (C++) and Java is done in JNI
- the main core is programmed in Java
- the translation engine is based on Google-translate
Licenses:
- all code is available for free under the Apache License, ver 2.0 and it is posted at google code. Read the install tutorial.
Dialogue:
- we encourage the dialogue, so please do feedback us. (feedback may include, but it is not limited to: observations and questions about code, wish-list of new technical tutorials, contributions to the project, collaboration opportunities etc.)
- a brief documentation of the Mezzofanti user interface and the System architecture.
Who was the real Mezzofanti:
Giuseppe Caspar Mezzofanti (19 September 1774 – 15 March 1849) was an Italian cardinal and famed linguist and hyperpolyglot. Mezzofanti was well-known for being a hyperpolyglot who fluently spoke thirty-eight languages and forty dialects, despite never traveling outside of Italy. (more about the cardinal on Wikipedia)
A funny video with the usage of Mezzofanti:
Hey guys… great work. Thanks a lot. Was looking for a way to use the tesseract engine on android.
I can’t seem to take a picture with my G2 (Mytouch 3g). I tried touching everywhere on my screen, volume buttons, home, menu, back, search, trackball, even start / end call buttons. Nothing.
Is this a G1 only app? or did I miss something?
I like the idea. It’s one of the few apps I didn’t skip on the adc2 app.
Dear user,
we are very happy you like Mezzofanti.
If there is no camera button on the screen than the application you hold is for G1 only. Never the less there is one app for G2 (and other phones without the photo button) – please download the app from http://code.google.com/p/mezzofanti/ (version 1_0_3 featured downloads).
Thank you and looking forward for your feedback.
Enjoy using Mezzofanti
Best regards,
Vlad
Hi
Great work… thanks so much for the application and tutorials… all very helpful and well done.
The application did not run on my G1 with 16 MB flash when I first attempted to run it. I saw an error message “not enough space for installation on external storage” with a negative value for total external storage capacity.
To fix this I modified AssetsManager.GetFreeSpaceB() to cast stat.getAvaialableBocks() and stat.getBlockSize() to longs before multiplying. After this change everything worked on my setup.
Thanks again for the helpful application, source code and tutorials.