Portable Translator Capable of Recognizing Characters on Signboard and Menu Captured by its Built-in Camera

Hideharu Nakajima, Yoshihiro Matsuo, Masaaki Nagata, Kuniko Saito

Abstract: We present a portable translator that recognizes and translates phrases on signboards and menus as captured by a built-in camera. This system can be used on PDAs or mobile phones and resolves the difficulty of inputting some character sets such as Japanese and Chinese if the user doesn't know their readings. Through the high speed mobile network, small images of signboards can be quickly sent to the recognition and translation server. Since the server runs state of the art recognition and translation technology and huge dictionaries, the proposed system offers more accurate character recognition and machine translation.