There is no need to actually OCR the image [LWN.net]

There is no need to actually OCR the image

Posted Aug 26, 2006 4:43 UTC (Sat) by spitzak (guest, #4593)
Parent article: Fighting image spam

There is no need to actually read the text in the image. All that is needed is a way to detect that the image *is* text. Since ther is no legitimate reason to send text as an image this will indicate span. I'm pretty sure it is far easier to indicate that an image contains a lot of text with 99% certanty than it is to determine the image's text contains a certain word.

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There is no need to actually OCR the image

Posted Aug 28, 2006 17:43 UTC (Mon) by tack (subscriber, #12542) [Link]

I occasionally receive scanned newspaper articles that may be of interest to me.

I prefer the approach of OCRing the image and filtering that through a Bayesian classifier. One might be able to use some of the techniques described here to first optionally determine if the image likely contains a lot of text, and only then OCR it, which would help out with the CPU overhead.