An innovative scanning experience for all Mac users.
Scan or shoot a document, and let Prizmo take charge.
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cropping and everything else." Joe Turner from MacApper.com |
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| Optical Character Recognition
A Mac OCR Application for Everyone. At last. OCR on the Mac? Yes, there are a few applications on the market but they are either far too expensive or unreliable. At the end of the day, most Mac users were pretty disappointed, and thought it better to wait for something else. They deserve a better solution indeed... This time is over. We integrated the technology of a world-famous OCR specialist, ExperExchange Inc., into Prizmo, and released a user-friendly and reliable solution all Mac users can afford. So, you can really do without a scanner, even more now. Available in 10 Languages Prizmo's character recognition technology supports 10 languages (English, French, German, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Danish and Norwegian). And the results are Spotlight indexable. |
"Prizmo’s optical character recognition abilities are impressive. It does a good job of recognizing printed type, not just in a flat image but also in distorted, perspective-altered camera images. Suddenly those off-the-cuff, spontaneous images are usable again." Lisa Maloney from MacNN |
Focus: you can easily read the whole text on the middle image. That's why you'll get accurate OCR results. However, it is difficult to distinguish the letter shape on the left image, and there are many black spots on the right image. OCR will perform poorly.
Here is a tip to help you get better results: before performing OCR, move the binarization slider from left to right (and vice versa).
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| Perspective Correction Now everything is possible When you take a picture of a document, lighting and centring are seldom perfect. But what did you expect? A work environment or a living area is very different from a photo studio. You can easily imagine at first sight that the quality of such pictures is poorer than the quality of images processed with a scanner. However, when you carefully think about it, it doesn't really matter as Prizmo can perform many tricks. Besides common image processing features (brightness, contrast, saturation...), Prizmo is able to correct perspective. Draw a grid on the input photograph to select the area you want to process. Prizmo will use this grid to straighten the image. From now on, you don't need to waste your time anymore for taking perfect pictures. Prizmo is able to process all images, even the more spontaneous ones.
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Much more than standard size documents Prizmo has another major asset: you can work with documents which are far too large to fit in a scanner. So, you are not limited to common documents. Imagine: a poster along the road... A giant movie board... A real estate advertisement... The shooting angle when you take the picture doesn't matter anymore. Click a few times in Prizmo, and you'll get good images which are ready to use for archiving purposes. You can find several real-life examples in the gallery. |
Focus: The interest area selected in the input picture using the grid (left), and the output you get with Prizmo after correcting perspective and some image processing (right).
| Lens Distortion Correction Which camera can I use? Compact cameras, DSLRS,... every digital camera is fine. The higher resolution the better of course, but you can get good results even with the camera of an iPhone 3GS or iPhone 4. Nowadays, cameras often have 10 megapixel sensors. A 10 megapixel image is roughly as good as, or even better than a 300 dpi US-Letter scan. With some image processing improvements and binarization, you can even go beyond 600 dpi with such images.
You access the calibration database (which is hosted on Creaceed's secure severs) from the Optical Data window in Prizmo. There, you can:
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"The amount of image control in Prizmo is impressive for a $40 application and any further problems with recognition can be reduced by calibrating the software for your camera. Creaceed have also made it possible for users to swap their camera calibration files so there is no excuse for the perfect OCR." David from TotalApps.net Community-based Calibration Database Calibrating your camera can help you achieve better results when you use Prizmo. With a good calibration model, Prizmo can indeed better correct lens distortion on your photographs. After importing a photograph, Prizmo automatically searches for information about the camera model, lens and zoom.  |
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Page Curvature Correction And curves become straight lines... Have you ever tried to perform OCR on pages of a magazine or a dictionary? Unlike the text printed on most of the page, words near the binding are warped, and lines look much more like curves than straight lines. Therefore, OCR results related to words near the binding are usually, and unsurprisingly, pretty poor. Once again, Prizmo can help you fix this with a unique feature among OCR applications: page curvature correction. |
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It's time for another magic trick. Locate the highest spot of the page on the top side of the grid (and the lowest spot of the page on the bottom side of the grid). Then, use the arrows to imitate the page curvature shape as good as you can. And Prizmo will take charge of everything else. Check the output image quality by previewing the result in real time. It is available in the left pane of the application window. Do you want to take a closer look? Maximize the preview for better seeing the details. That did the trick! The image is now ready for performing OCR. All steps are described in detail in the user guide.  "Prizmo is ridiculously cheap for a product that already has powerful features and which promises so much more." Erik Vlietinck from IT.Enquirer.com |
Focus: the text on the input photograph (top), and what the very same text looks like after correcting page curvature (bottom).  |