The Libretro Team

Progress made on OCR bounty

Added 2019-04-30 20:40:34 +0000 UTC

https://www.bountysource.com/issues/52185180-proposal-adding-ocr-and-translation-button-to-allow-playing-games-from-any-language

Real progress is being made on this bounty by a developer. What you see above is a real-time screenshot being taken from a Proof of Concept build.

What you see is the game being paused, a screenshot being taken of the game screen. What happens next is that the screenshot is transferred to a live service and then the image is being checked for matching patterns. What you see above is the final result being sent back from the server - it overlays on top the characters it recognized as text along with a dump of the interpreted text.

In this case, it's using both the Google Vision API to do the OCR, and the Google Translate api to translate the image.

There's also an option to use tesseract locally for the OCR step, but it's currently in a more premature state.

The ultimate goal of the bounty is as follows:

This is a proposal to make it possible to play any game in any language with no ROM hack needed.

We are very excited about the potential this bounty holds and the progress that has already been made, and have the utmost confidence in this bounty being able to be successfully completed.