Babelshot | Translate Via iPhone’s Camera

By SRASC at 1 November, 2009, 9:59 am

Codium Labs has released Babelshot, a revolutionary application that allows automatic real-time translation of printed text using iPhone camera. Busy professionals and foreign travelers can use Babelshot to instantly translate items like restaurant menus, hotel booklets, product manuals, or snippets from books and newspapers.

All you have to do is select source and target languages, take a photo of the item, and select text portion of it that you want to translate. The translated text is then displayed next to the original photo of the item and can be saved for future reference. No typing on iPhone keyboard is needed.

Babelshot supports automatic translation between 32 world languages. Options are available for manual correction of recognition errors that may occur in complex or imperfect documents, as well as for full manual input.

Babelshot incorporates innovative image processing algorithms coupled with state-of-the-art Tesseract Optical Character Recognition (OCR) engine, adapted and optimized for use on mobile devices. Unlike existing OCR-enabled applications for iPhone, Babelshot does not offload text recognition task to web server and performs text recognition on mobile device in real-time.