from Hacker News

How I OCR hundreds of hours of video (2011)

by joe_bleau on 8/10/14, 7:49 PM with 17 comments

  • by samirmenon on 8/10/14, 11:33 PM

    This is awesome. Who cares that it's a little cumbersome - it works!

    On a more national scale, could something like this be done for Congress? C-SPAN already does most of the hard work of filming and uploading to the web, so perhaps it won't be too difficult. I think it would certainly attract a lot of interest... maybe I'll give it a go.

  • by waldoj on 8/10/14, 9:59 PM

    Here's the code on GitHub: https://github.com/openva/video-indexer It's terrible (I wrote it for a very narrow use case, and only run it ~200 times each year), but it's enough to get the idea.

  • by PeterisP on 8/11/14, 8:44 AM

    His OCR errors (Del. Jennifer L. McClellan -> Del. Jennifer L i\1cCie1ian) look like something that would be easily fixable at the right spot - the dictionaries and language models used by Tesseract.

    While a spellchecker might fix Jenn1fer -> Jennifer, at the OCR stage there is much more information to do it properly; but it obviously doesn't know that McClellan is valid word and thus a much more likely alternative than i\1cCie1ian, and it needs to be told that. The list of speakers on those videos is limited, and their surnames can be added to the appropriate dictionaries to improve their recognition.

  • by robinhoodexe on 8/10/14, 9:16 PM

    http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...

    Google cache of the site if it's unavailable (I'm getting a database error).

  • by burnte on 8/10/14, 9:19 PM

    I would think the first few steps could be combined into one, faster step by using Handbrake to rip DVDs directly to MP4. But I also don't see why that stage takes hours on his machine, even on my 2006 rig it took less than the playtime of the DVD.

  • by MisterNegative on 8/10/14, 9:29 PM

    The title is very misleading for me, I expected magic but it was kind of disappointing. They don't even OCR actual video, instead they just take a few screenshots.