Ocrad tries to translate the rasterized text, which can take a few seconds, and then sends back the digitized characters so that you can then use Paste/Ctrl-V. If you then proceed to select some text and hit “Copy Text” (or Ctrl-C), it’s parceled up and sent off to a server running the open-source Ocrad OCR engine. Web workers (parallel multiple background threads) are used to perform the text detection without affecting browser performance.

Naptha only begins this text detection phase when it detects that your mouse pointer is moving towards an image - it would be very expensive to perform SWT (and later OCR) on every image on the page, after all. To do this, Naptha uses Microsoft Research’s Stroke Width Transform (SWT), a very fast and simple algorithm that relies on the fact that fonts usually have a fairly uniform stroke width, and are thus easy to pick out.

This is quite hard, as the text could be layered on top of any number of backgrounds. First, before OCR can be carried out, it has to actually identify whether there are blocks of text in an image. Project Naptha, despite its apparent simplicity, is a very complex piece of software. It isn’t perfect in its functionality, and Kwok admits that it probably lags behind current state-of-the-art tools by “a few years” - but it is definitely good enough and, more importantly, we can’t really complain given that there’s absolutely nothing else like it on the market.Īnimated GIF showing Project Naptha allowing you to copy text out of a meme Project Naptha, created by developer Kevin “antimatter15” Kwok, is essentially a complete text detection and OCR (optical character recognition) suite crammed into a JavaScript browser extension.

You can also select the text and translate it into another language, or attempt to remove the text entirely (much like Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill function). Have you ever ended up on one of those awful websites where the text is saved as an image, preventing you from selecting or copying it? Or maybe you want to share the text from a comic, screenshot, or meme without painstakingly transcribing it? Now, with the Project Naptha browser extension, you can use your mouse to select the rasterized text from any image that you find on the web, and then paste that text elsewhere.

How to copy and paste text in photoshop