Hi,
what would be the best approach to extract data from a screencast? The task is to acquire some data from the display of a GUI program used interactively by a user. There are a couple 'fields' (as in "designated areas of the display") in which the relevant data is being displayed while the program is being used. The acquired data needs to be entered into a mysql database, preferably as soon as possible. (The program needs windoze, and the sources are unavailable :( ) The idea is to make a screen recording and postprocess the recording with some sort of OCR software. This might require using ffmpeg (or the like) to create a single image from each frame of the recording; then treat each image with an OCR software to get the interesting data which can then be entered into the database. Data to extract is mostly numbers. The relevant fields can be expected to be either filled or empty. The FPS rate of the recording can be kept reasonably low, like 1 FPS, or perhaps even less, depending on how frequent the relevant fields change. Using tesseract comes to mind, but after reading that "Tesseract's output will be very poor quality if the input images are not preprocessed to suit it: Images (especially screenshots) must be scaled up such that the text x-height is at least 20 pixels,[12] any rotation or skew must be corrected or no text will be recognized, low-frequency changes in brightness must be high-pass filtered, or Tesseract's binarization stage will destroy much of the page, and dark borders must be manually removed, or they will be misinterpreted as characters."[1] I'm even more doubtful that this would produce usable results with sufficient reliability. So what might be the best way to get text/numbers out of what a program displays? [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tesseract_(software)
