OCR on text while driving

dexter

I would like to put the OAK-D in a car and have it detect text on cars and buildings I'm driving by. It would also be interesting to get a hint of direction and distance if possible.
I have been looking around trying to find something that does this already, but no luck so far.
Any suggestions for a good way to achieve this?

erik

Hi dexter ,
Have you tried the OCR demo already? What were the results like?
Thanks, Erik

dexter

Thanks for the link! I just got my camera and was looking around for something like this. I tried it today and it works pretty well. I'll have to look into the info it shows/logs, I didn't immediately see any distance info.

erik

Hi @dexter ,
THat's because there is no distance info in that particular demo🙂 You could calcualte spatial coordinates on the host (demo here) and you could get the ROI from the east text detection model. Thoughts?
Thanks, Erik

dexter

Thanks for that link as well! I'll see if I can figure out how to "merge" that in. It seems like there is no particular benefit from calculating it on the device, so doing it on the host should yield the same results?
I'll also need to try and get more info on the OCR. Looks like it might not be doing digits and Swedish characters.
Thanks again!

erik

Hi dexter ,
The benefit of doing it on the device would be having less computing needed on your host, and also less delay - as you don't need to transfer depth frame, only spatial coordinates. Yes I think that the particular NN model used only recognizes English characters.
Thanks, Erik