TECH - Software detects and extracts text from within video frames, makes it searchable

As video recording technology improves in performance and falls in price, ever-more events are being captured within video files. If all of this footage could be searched effectively, it would represent an invaluable information repository. One option to help catalogue large video databases is to extract text, such as street signs or building names, from the background of each recording. Now, a method that automates this process has been developed by a research team at the National University of Singapore, which also included Shijian Lu at the A*STAR Institute for Infocomm Research.

http://phys.org/news/2013-01-software-text-video-searchable.htm