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Unprojecting text with ellipses (2016)
Using transformed ellipses to estimate perspective transformations of text.
In the spring of 2016, I advised a couple of students working on a combined optical character recognition (OCR) and translation smartphone app for their Engineering senior design project. Users had to be careful, however, to photograph the text they wanted to translate head-on, so as to avoid strong perspective distortion of the type evidenced beautifully in the opening crawl for each of the Star Wars films: Again, I don’t want to claim that the work I did is state-of-the-art or even that it’s superior to existing methods like Merino-Gracia et al. – I just relish the process of wrapping my head around a technical challenge and carving it up into a sequence of well-defined optimization problems, as I’ve done in the past with my image fitting and page dewarping posts.
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