We have already discussed this with you. But you can recognize text not only using the program. This can be done using online services, without having any programs on your computer.

And indeed, why install any programs if you need to recognize text once, and in the future you are not going to use this program? Or do you need to do this once a month? In this case extra program not needed on a computer.

Let's look at a few services with which you can recognize text from pictures for free, easy and fast.

Free Online OCR

A very good service for recognizing text from pictures online is the service Free Online OCR. It does not require registration and recognizes text from images of almost any format. works with 58 languages. Its text recognition is excellent.

This service is easy to use. When you go to it, you will have only two options: upload a file from your computer, or paste the URL of the picture if it is on the Internet.

If your image is on your computer, click on the button Select file , then select your file and click on the button Upload. You will see your graphic file below and a button above it OCR. Click this button and you will get the text that you can find at the bottom of the page.

Online OCR Net

It’s also a pretty good service that allows you to recognize texts from pictures online for free, and without registration. It supports 48 languages, including Russian, Chinese, Korean and Japanese. To start working with it, go to Online OCR, press the button Select file, and select the file on your computer. There are size restrictions - the file should not weigh more than 5 MB.

In the adjacent fields, select the language and extension of the text document in which the text obtained from the image will be. After that, enter the captcha below and click on the button Convert right.

At the bottom there will be text that you can copy, and above the text there will be a link to download a file with this text.

ABBYY FineReader Online

A very good service in terms of its versatility. On ABBYY FineReader Online You can not only recognize text from pictures, but also translate documents, convert tables from pictures to Excel, and from scans.

This service has registration, but you can get by by logging in using social network Facebook, Google+ services, or Microsoft Account.

The advantage of this approach is that the created documents will be stored in your account for 14 days, and even if you delete them from your computer, you can return to the service and download them again.

Online OCR Ru

A service similar to the previous one, with information in Russian. How the service works Online OCR the same as everyone else - click on the Select file button, upload a picture, select the language and output format of the text document, and click on the Recognize text button.

In addition to recognizing text from pictures, the service provides the ability to convert images into PDF, Excel, HTML and other formats, and the structure and layout of the document will correspond to the one in the picture.

This service also has registration, and the files you create with its help will be stored in your personal account.

These image text recognition services are, in my opinion, the best. I hope they will be useful to you too. Also maybe I'm not everything good services illuminated I look forward to your comments on how much you liked these services, which services you use, and which of them are, in your opinion, the most convenient.

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For translation from a picture, among which there is Yandex.Translator for Android ().

What's the point

You upload a picture or photo to the site, and Yandex recognizes the text on it and translates it.

For example, you can take a photo of a menu, a sign, or a chart with captions. The translator is not very picky about the quality of the photo; a photo taken at an angle or stretched will do.

I noticed that the photo taken with the camera Samsung phone recognized much worse than photos from a normal camera or iPhone. It's about the quality of the optics and the resolution of the image. With Samsung it is possible to recognize only large letters.

What languages ​​are pictures recognized from?

From English, Russian, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, Portuguese, Turkish, Ukrainian, French, Chinese, Norwegian, Swedish, Danish and Czech - a total of 15 languages.

What languages ​​are the pictures translated into?

Almost any language; there are currently 94 languages ​​in the project.

Translation of pictures is also available in mobile version online, and also has applications for iOS and Android.

How to use - general algorithm

Nuances of use or how to improve translation quality

Pay attention to the option "Words", "Lines" and "Blocks". This is an important setting that affects the quality of the translation. It appears after you have uploaded the image.

• “Words” - what is written in the picture is perceived as separate words. And it is translated word by word.
• “Lines” – the text is translated line by line.
• “Blocks” – the text is translated as a single whole.

There is a line in my picture, so I select "Lines". And by default everything would be translated according to a separate word, which would be wrong. After all, I am translating the sentence “The Ministry of Health is tired of warning” as a whole, and not word by word.

And if I were translating a graph where incomprehensible words are assigned to the X and Y axis, I would select the “Words” option.

And the photographed paragraph from the book, of course, should be translated as a block.

Compare how the inscription in the picture is translated when you select the “Words” and “Lines” options:

Alternatives to a translator

The main competitor of Yandex.Translate is Google Translate. But it recognizes the Russian language worse. And in order to use it, you need to perform some tricky steps:

1. Upload the image to drive.google.com and right-click the file.
2. Select “Open with” -> “Google Docs”.

This is the recognition stage that converts the image into text.

From a mobile device, everything is much simpler: there are ones that support translation from the camera, including translators from Yandex, Abbyy, Google and Microsoft.

How does translation from a picture from Yandex.Translate work?

The work is divided into two stages: image recognition and text translation. And a neural network, a self-learning system, provides great help. The more pictures she recognizes and translates, the better she knows how to do it correctly.

Previously, text translation used rigid algorithms that matched the source word to the translation according to the dictionary and grammar rules. The result was terrible.

Then statistical translation came into play - when a huge array of ready-made paired original-translation texts was involved in the translation. The algorithm searched for it and calculated the most likely result of the translation of a phrase or word. And the entire text was assembled from such probabilistic pieces. Yandex has used a statistical system since its launch.

Now a neural network is involved, which is capable of self-learning and copes well with processing natural data. And text and pictures are natural data. The neural network translates entire sentences without splitting them into individual phrases and words.

Since statistical translation works better in some cases, and a neural network works better in others, both are used. This is a hybrid translation system that is used now.

The quality has improved significantly. There are, of course, mistakes, but still this is a step forward compared to what it was 10 years ago.

Contents:

Program selection

How do such services work?

The principle of their operation is as follows– the user uploads a picture that depicts text in a foreign language, the service processes and recognizes it, then converts it into text format and automatically translates it.

At the exit, the user receives a ready-made text document with translation of the source text.

The quality of the service depends on the quality of the recognition algorithms that are used in its operation.

They are based on the presence of characteristic elements and signs in a particular language.

Based on the combination of elements, the service recognizes individual characters and then words.

The text recognized in this way is automatically translated using systems or .

In general, we can say that even the highest quality services do not give very good results.

Almost any such resource has a number of problems in its functioning:

• It is well able to recognize only text from a high-quality photograph, ideally from a scan;
• Does not work well with pages that have a complex structure; many services cannot even process pages on which the text is printed in two columns;
• Not all fonts and formatting types are recognized adequately; small ones are poorly recognized; line spacing is too large or too small;
• It is almost impossible to recognize handwritten text in this way;
• Even if recognition was more or less successful, significant errors may occur in the translation algorithm itself, since automatic translation is always of low quality, and in combination with recognition errors, you can sometimes get completely incoherent text or even a set of characters;
• It is almost impossible to translate more or less specialized texts, since translators do not work with special terms.

To summarize, we can say that in the complete absence of knowledge of the original language, such services will be of little help in understanding the meaning of the source text.

Errors in recognition, coupled with imperfect automatic translation algorithms, can completely distort the meaning of the source text. However, if you have basic knowledge of the original language, such services can provide significant assistance in understanding the essence of what is written.

Specifications

There are several services that provide relatively high-quality (compared to others) recognition of the source text from a picture.

Features of working with them are given below.

Yandex Translator

Although most users use this service only to work with text fragments in a foreign language, it can also work with pictures, and even entire sites.

To translate text from a picture using this service, do the following:

• Find the Picture link at the top of the page and click on it;
• The page will refresh and you will see a field for dragging a picture;
• Drag the picture into the field from the Desktop using the mouse or click Select file;
• After this, the standard Explorer of your operating system– indicate the desired picture in it and click Open – after this the image will be uploaded to the service;

• A picture will appear in the drag-and-drop field with the following highlighted in yellow: what is highlighted in yellow is recognized by the service as text;
• If the service does not recognize all the text, you can make a number of settings: first indicate the source language of the original, then the desired translation language;

• When you click on the arrow between the language names, they will change places;
• Specify the structure of the text, thus helping the service recognize what exactly needs to be translated - to do this, click on the Lines button (by default) in the upper left corner of the translator window;

• A drop-down menu will open, if in it you click on Words, the recognition format will change - not entire lines, but individual words will be highlighted for recognition (the screenshots show that in the text taken as an example, more errors appear in this recognition format, so how words are defined incorrectly);

• When you click on the Blocks section, entire blocks of printed text will be highlighted - this is convenient for documents with complex formatting, large indents and free spaces, pictures;
• Once you have determined the source language and the most suitable OCR format, look for the button in the upper right corner of the window Open in Translator and click on it;

• The page will refresh– the recognized text from the original image will be transferred to the standard input field for the original text;
• Its automatic translation will immediately appear in the field on the right.

• Recognition results are not always so good;
• The example shows errors in text recognition (for example, in the first word), but the result is not bad, which is explained by the high quality of the image, standard formatting, and the literary simplicity of the original text.
• Low operating speed.

Ivan:“For me, recognition is easy due to the fact that the picture in the example shows standard text with a simple structure. In other cases there are errors."

NewOCR.com

Another popular and quite functional service created for recognizing text from a picture.

It also has a simultaneous translation function.

However, following the algorithm, the user, even without knowing the interface language, will be able to use the functionality of the service:

• Click on the Select file button - a standard one will open Explorer for your operating system, in which you must double-click or click on the Select the desired picture button;
• In the field below, indicate the original language - you can specify several languages ​​if you are not sure or if there are several languages ​​present (in this case, recognition algorithms for all specified languages ​​will be applied for each word, which may cause inaccuracies, so it is better to translate fragments into different languages separately);
• After that, click on the Upload +OCR button;
• Wait for the process to complete, which takes much longer than a similar one in Yandex;
• After this you will see the original image with the selected fragment– this is the fragment that the service was able to recognize as text and translated;
• If the text has several columns or blocks, you need to check the box next to the source and translation language field;
• After that, click OCR;
• In this case, the analysis will be repeated and the system will take into account the structure of the text.

• The quality of recognition and translation is quite high;
• If the quality of the text is low, some fragments are still recognized, and translation is carried out for that part of the text that was analyzed and recognized;
• Ability to manually define blocks of text.

• The service operates only in English;
• The system does not work with very low quality texts;
• The recognition quality is lower than that of Yandex.

Kirill:“Not a bad service if the texts are of good quality.”

Google Translate

Download the application to your mobile device by following the link:

Although the services described above can also be used from mobile devices, this is quite inconvenient and places a significant load on hardware resources.

Therefore, to translate text from a picture on a smartphone or tablet, it is better to use special applications and services.

It was Google that presented a convenient and functional service from photos online for mobile devices on Android based and iOS. Using the service, you can perform recognition both from a finished photo and one taken directly in at the moment text.

The service is not very convenient when it comes to large text, but it helps to recognize names on signs and road signs, etc.

The translation accuracy is quite high.

In order to use this function on your mobile device you will need to download mobile application.

Install the application and launch it.

Functionality and navigation do not differ depending on the operating system, because act according to the algorithm:

• In the top field in the application header, above the text entry field, indicate the source language of the word being filmed, and next to it, select the language into which you want to translate it;
• Click on the Camera button at the bottom of the text entry window;
• The camera on your mobile device will work– point it at the word you want to translate and wait until the service determines its location;

We will talk about translators who recognize text from a photograph and thereby save the user’s time by eliminating manual text entry from the algorithm. This program will be useful for working with texts in a foreign language, for students who need to complete an assignment, as well as for tourists who find themselves in another country without special knowledge of the language.

Such services appeared relatively recently and are only gaining popularity. There are no strict rules when working with such applications. The main thing is that the text requiring translation is readable. Many programs recognize a photograph or picture even with unclear image. All the user needs to do is load the necessary material into the program, wait for scanning and receive the finished translated text.

The translation is carried out with the ability to copy, which means that the client of the program does not have to manually retype the resulting material. Parts of the text that may not have been translated correctly can be copied a separate fragment and re-translate it in online or offline services.

Popular apps

Today, many developers offer to use the services of their projects for the transaction of text from a photograph or picture. Most popular projects:

Online services

Some programs have versions adapted to work online. In this case, there is no need to download applications:

1. ABBY FineReader Online - the service works with many image formats and allows the user to upload the necessary material directly to the resource. Then on your own defines language the original document and performs translation, including from English into Russian. The result can be saved not only in text format, but also in PDF. You can use it on the official website of the company https://finereaderonline.com/ru-ru.
2. New OCR - the online resource has intuitive controls and is very easy to use. All that is required to get started is to go to the official website of the developer http://www.newocr.com/ and in the window that opens download the required file. Below, a menu will be offered in which the user must select the language of the original document and the language into which the transaction will be carried out. The application works with all possible image formats.

To work better with translation services, you should remember a few things:

• Downloadable image must be clear.
• The service performs exclusively automatic machine translation, so some complex sentences may be interpreted incorrectly. In this case, it is advisable to translate phrases that form a sentence separately.
• Best to use following formats to download the original image JPEG, PNG, GIF, BMP.

In today's age of globalization, we can often find photographs with text in English. If you know the language of Shakespeare and Byron, great, but what about non-English users who want to know the meaning of the English words in the picture? In this case, a number of tools that can perform recognition and quick translation can help us. Below we will look at which translators from English into Russian for any photo are available to us absolutely free, and how to work with them.

How do translators from English into Russian recognize text from a photograph?

Text recognition from photos is performed using OCR technology (“Optical Character Recognition” - optical character recognition). This technology has not yet reached the level of ideal work, and continues to improve. Accurate recognition and translation is possible if there is a clear image in the photo, when the letters are separated from each other. They are also painted in a contrasting color, different from the surrounding background.

OCR technology allows you to recognize text in an image

At the same time, the primacy in translation and recognition technologies belongs to large companies such as Google, Microsoft, Yandex and a number of others that are capable of investing significant financial resources in research. The quality of the tools they provide is at high level, and is not comparable to competing products from other developers.

When recognizing texts, Google uses the "Tesseract OCR" tool, previously purchased from HP

Let's look at which photo translators in different languages ​​can be used for free.

Google Translator - a convenient application for reading from photos

Of course, Google translator (Android, iOS) is top class. In addition to the direct text translation function, it allows you to translate images, as they say, “on the go,” simply by pointing the camera of your smartphone at the inscription.

Google Translate lets you translate images on the go

To work with the translator, just launch it and click on the camera icon. You can either use your phone to translate on the go, or download the photo you need from your phone’s memory. And convert text from English to Russian using a photo for free.

Click on the camera icon

Microsoft Translator - instantly read and translate text in any language

“Microsoft Translator” (Android, iOS) is very similar to the Google translator we mentioned above, except that it does not have the function of instantly translating photos.

Main differences from Google Translator:

And make no mistake, this application is not just a photo translator from English to Russian or any other online language. It can translate voice and text, and supports more than 60 languages. You can even have bilingual conversations by having two people literally place a phone between them and take turns speaking. Great, isn't it?

iTranslate - professional picture translator

Although the developers highlight the voice and vocabulary elements of this program, the iTranslate app (Android, iOS) does have photo translator capabilities for its professional version, which we can't help but mention.

This feature is called "iTranslate Lens". It's the same point-and-translate option, but important feature The program is able to manipulate the size of the translation window and move it. You can expand or shrink it so that any text found inside your field will be converted. Unlike the first two apps, which place the work window at a dead center on the screen, in iTranslate you can drag it wherever you want. And, when your photo translation is done, you have the opportunity view results in full screen for unobstructed viewing. Very convenient.

The professional version of iTranslate works well with photos

Online services for translation from English into Russian using a picture

Online services are a convenient tool for transforming text from English into Russian using a photograph. They do not require installation on your PC (smartphone) additional programs, carry out fast translation. At the same time, the quality of their recognition is generally inferior to specialized mobile translator applications, which we will consider below.

To work with such services just upload the desired photo with English text. Further, if necessary, it is necessary select the inscription on the image for translation and start the recognition procedure. In just a second or two you will get the desired result.

We are considering online services for translation from photo

Yandex Translator - will help you convert text from a photo for free

Yandex is famous for the quality of the digital products it creates. So in our case, her service for translating text in a picture online is one of the best options. Working with it is very simple, convenient, and the recognition results obtained are at a high level.

Do the following:

1. Go to translate.yandex.ru;
2. Tap on the inscription “Select file" and upload the picture to the resource;
   

   

   Click on "Select file" to upload a photo to the resource

3. The inscriptions will be automatically colored yellow.
4. You need to tap on the inscription on the picture and it will be translated;
   

   

   Recognized inscriptions will be marked in yellow

5. To make a translation, click on “ Open in Translator» on the top right and view the result.
   

   

   View the result

   NewOCR.com - convenient Translate online

   NewOCR.com is a free OCR service that can recognize and translate photo captions in many languages. The service does not require registration, securely stores data uploaded to it, and runs on the " Tesseract OCR"and can recognize 122 languages. The service's tools allow you to select places in the photo that need to be recognized, which increases the efficiency of the service.