Sultan Orazbayev SultanOrazbayev

OS X Screencast to animated GIF

This gist shows how to create a GIF screencast using only free OS X tools: QuickTime, ffmpeg, and gifsicle.

Instructions

To capture the video (filesize: 19MB), using the free "QuickTime Player" application:

Using Python 3 + Google Cloud Vision API's OCR to extract text from photos and scanned documents

Just a quickie test in Python 3 (using Requests) to see if Google Cloud Vision can be used to effectively OCR a scanned data table and preserve its structure, in the way that products such as ABBYY FineReader can OCR an image and provide Excel-ready output.

The short answer: No. While Cloud Vision provides bounding polygon coordinates in its output, it doesn't provide it at the word or region level, which would be needed to then calculate the data delimiters.

On the other hand, the OCR quality is pretty good, if you just need to identify text anywhere in an image, without regards to its physical coordinates. I've included two examples:

####### 1. A low-resolution photo of road signs

Setting up flask app in heroku with a database

The below article will cover the intricacies of setting up databases and heroku in respect to a flask app. This is more like a memo and will have out of sequence instructions or solutions to errors so read thoroughly.

Setting up a database

You'll need the packages

	import sys
	import numpy as np
	from PIL import Image

	binarized_text = sys.argv[1] if len(sys.argv) == 2 else 'text.png'

	# Binarized (1-bit image)
	data = np.array(Image.open(binarized_text))
	Image.fromarray(np.uint8(data * 255)).show()

	import numbers

	import six

	import numpy
	import matplotlib.collections
	from matplotlib import pyplot

	# using example from
	# http://nbviewer.ipython.org/github/dpsanders/matplotlib-examples/blob/master/colorline.ipynb