Performing OCR on input or output

[mintograde]

To preface, I don't have any experience working with OBS in a development sense, or with OCR in general, and I'm using this small project as a way to learn both. In other words, this is more of an "is this even possible" kind of post.

My goal is to generate a timestamped log of post-game stats (example here), so I can more easily keep track of when I play games and with whom. The game itself is on a console, and the official stats website does not contain any of the stats I'm looking for, so I believe my only option is to process the video through OBS while streaming/recording.

I'm less concerned about the actual OCR part, as I see that as the "fun" part to learn. My first concern is just getting the image data from OBS so I can start playing with/manipulating it.

I'm not sure where to start, though, so here are some initial questions:

• Is the OBS stream output exposed to external applications through some API already?
• If not, should I start by making a plugin that, say, takes a snapshot N times per second and either dumps out an image file or allows communication with external applications?
• Should the OCR functionality even be developed as an application external to OBS, or would it be easier to do the OCR stuff as a plugin within OBS?

 

[Fanatic]

Don't really need OBS for this do you? You just need a screenshot of the scoreboard, then some OCR software to read it the scores off of it.

 

[mintograde]

Well, I plan on recording/streaming all the games I play anyway, so OBS will already be open and grabbing video. The goal is to record data when a new scoreboard is detected, so I'm trying to avoid taking screenshots manually.

 

[Fanatic]

You say "manually" like it would be a complicated thing :). Just need to press 1 hotkey when the scoreboard appears. Can probably even have the screenshot file named with the date and time.

Having some OCR software constantly scanning to detect a scoreboard would add a lot of processing requirements I would think.

Would be nice if OBS had some screenshot functionality.

 

[JonyGreen]

I find another free online ocr, it's using tesseract ocr 3.02.

 

[hayak]

Hi, everyone,

Just wanted to share our progress with Scoreboard OCR application that we have been developing for last several months.

Here is a small demonstration video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QYaEx6PFN1M

If this is something you migth be interested in, try out the Scoreboard OCR yourself at IBC (Hall 6, Stand C12, opposite of Bird-dog and vMix) !

Arturs