Hey I was just wondering if it is possible to scan a picture (lets say a .jpg) and scan it to look for a specific thing in the picture.
For example lets say i have a folder with 100+ .jpg files that and i want to scan them all for the word "One Piece" so that they can be filtered out to a sub folder called "One Piece".
With Python as the language being used. (If not Python then name one that could do it)
Not easily. Depends on the font, the font size, whether the font is antialiased, how lossy the compression is (causing artifacts), the rotation of the letters, etc.
It's pattern recognition/optical character recognition which is complicated and rarely 100% accurate unless you put unrealistic or simplifying constraints on the content of the image.
Case study: there is software which attempts to filter out pictures of nudie ladies/men which often gives false positives for various dessert foods (trifle, blancmange, cherry topped cakes, etc.). Also have a go at google image search "show similar pictures" when you drag a picture onto the search box.
Ok thanks that basically told me what i needed to know so i should try another way of doing it then.
Things like automatic online poker playing bots only search for a few pixels from the card numbers/letter/suit colour and test just those pixels in a certain location so they can recognise a card from known reference deck images as well (so they cheat and don't scan the whole card- just enough pixels to disambiguate any 2 cards).
The best pattern recognition computer is your brain when connected to your eyeball input devices; my advice - do it manually if you must (or pay someone else to do it for you ;)).
do it manually if you must (or pay someone else to do it for you ;))
It's a vastly underestimated resource: mildly-skilled computer users are dirt cheap in most of the world.
Contrary to popular myth, Interns are not terribly cheap. And can land you in a whole world of legal trouble when unpaid.
I'm not going to pay someone in (insert cheap outsourcing country here) to look at my dessert picture folder and categorise it into blancmange/trifle/cherry cakes for me though ;)
I'm not going to pay someone in (insert cheap outsourcing country here) to look at my dessert picture folder and categorise it into blancmange/trifle/cherry cakes for me though ;)
Why not, though?
You can spend an hour of your own time, which is worth, what, $50? Or you could pay a student/foreigner $10/hour for 2 hours...
Apologies for being entirely off-topic at this point.
I'm not the OP, for a start, I just answered the original question and started off the dessert theme and continued it for several posts too many I think ;) Some desserts are not suitable for viewing by sensitive and/or prying eyes.
That's why they invented anonymity and the internet 
Back on topic: the largest collection of data/algorithms in this topic is probably the efforts of people trying to defeat CAPTCHA images.
There is a handy overview of the topic here.
I think those are specifically designed to defeat my brain and eye peripherals too. They are still pretty contrived (in terms of unrealistic/simplifying constraints after all, they are generated by a computer algorithm) compared to the more general problem of identifying text from an arbitrary image.
Maybe if the OP described the problem in more detail it may help (e.g. is it a caption on a video still, logo or text appearing in a video, just reading arbitrary handwritten text from a picture). EDIT: Then we can say "It's just too hard!" with more confidence ;) EDIT2: Then direct them over to the AI forum where AI Dave can say the same thing but mention neural nets and stuffs ;)
